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Docslide - Us Eric Darier Discourses of The Environment
Docslide - Us Eric Darier Discourses of The Environment
Discourses of
the Environment
EDITED
BY
ERIC
DARIER
I] BLACI<WELL
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tibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contents
( :ontributors
VII
A~knowledgements
xt
Part I
Histories
35
37
63
79
95
Part II
Environmentalities
119
121
152
163
Syh,ia Howerlhlnk
Contents
VI
Part Ill
Resistances
179
181
203
11
217
Bibliography
Index
241
267
Contributors
VIII
Contributors
Contributors
IX
Lawrence Olivier has a B.A. in political science and a M.A. in political philosophy from universite Laval, Canada. He obtained his
Ph.D. in history and civilization at the universite Aix-Marseille,
!:ranee. Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
llniversity of Quebec in Montreal, Canada, he specializes in epistemology, political philosophy and the issue of Francophones and
J\cadians in Canada. He taught at the universite de Moncton and
11niversite Laval. Author of a recent book entitled Michel Foucault
f>enser au temps du nihilisme (Liber 1995), he has also edited
hooks to which he has been a contributor, and has published
\l'vcral scientific articles.
Peter Quigley obtained his Ph.D. from Indiana University of Penn... ylvania in 1990, focusing on cultural studies, Marxist aesthetics,
poststructural theory and environmental literature. He then won
.t Fulbright Scholarship and went to lecture and do research on
J\ merican literature and culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. Invited to stay for a second year, he took a permanent
position as Associate Professor of American Studies at the Univer..;ity of Tromso, Norway. He currently holds tenured positions at
hoth Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and the
llniversity of Tromso. He continues to do research in environlllcntal, technological and literary issues, and is developing a B.A.
programme in science, technology, and society for ERAU, where he
111tends to stay. In addition, he is working with University of Utah
l'ress to bring out a collection of articles on the much maligned
.tnd ignored environmental author Ed Abbey.
Paul Rutherford teaches environmental politics in the Departtncnt of Government and Public Administration at the University
ot Sydney, Australia, and is currently completing a Ph.D. in the
l{cscarch School of Social Sciences at the Australian National
llnivcrsity, Canberra. His current area of research deals with the
problcmatization of natural environment in contemporary politllal and social theory, and in particular seeks to use the notion of
'governmcntality' to understand the growth of environmental polItics and regulatory practices. He has had extensive experience as
.t policy advisor and political advisor in the areas of environmental
protection and natural rcsoun.:e management, with both nongovl'ntllll'ntal organizations and state agencies in Australia.
Contributors
Acknowledgements
XII
Acknowledgements
Eric Darier
Eric Darier
upon us when the multiple social circles in which we operate overlap and come into conflict. More importantly, a unified world view
gives our lives purpose, direction, coherency, and sanity. (Callicott
1990: 121)
Eric Darier
One of the main objectives of this book is to explore this essential, necessary tension between currents in environmentalism as
noted by Foucault and Beck, and, more precisely, the controversy
between the 'nature-endorsing' claim of a truth-discourse about
nature and the 'nature-sceptical' radical critique about the inescapable power effects of all knowledge, of all truth-claims. Despite
the fact that the work of Foucault seems to promise a challenging
contribution to our understanding, there has been a tendency to
omit Foucault from most critical studies in environmental theory
(Andermatt Conley 1997; Eckersley 1992; Goldblatt 1996; Hayward 1994; Merchant 1994 ). Hopefully, this book will fill the
obvious gap and explore the possible creative synergy between
two large corpora of critical literature which surprisingly haven't
yet met in a systematic fashion: (a) the works by, and about,
French theorist Michel Foucault and (h) environmental criticism.
Eric Darier
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in the french tradition of history and philosophy of science' {Gutting 1989: x-xi) represented by, among others, Jean Cavailli':s,
Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem {Canguilhem 1988,
1989). However, this 'tradition' doesn't represent the established
intellectual mainstream even in France. It may be a 'tradition',
,hut it is a marginal one in the ocean of Marxisms, ranging from
Caraudy through Althusser to Bourdieu, and of the different
schools of the 'philosophy of experience' {]. Miller 1993: 59)
represented by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and post-1-'reudian/Lacanian
psychoanalysis. This illustrates further what I described earlier
as Foucault's 'marginal belonging'. Secondly, archeology is not a
coherent theory or 'method' from which flow Foucault's studies
of madness {Foucault 1961, 1963) and the human sciences
{Foucault 1966). Rather, archeology is a post facto reconstruction/
justification of his earlier case studies. In fact, archeology is an
'ill-defined methodology' {Gutting 1989: 109) emerging from specific historical studies. Foucault only attempted to systematically
work through his archeological method in the last book of this
period The Archaeology of Knowledge which already pointed
to the subsequent deplacement toward 'genealogy' (Foucault 1969).
The main point that Foucault tried to make throughout this
period was that knowledge is relative to the historical context
from which it emerges. 'We are doomed historically to history, to
the patient construction of discourses about discourses, and to the
task of hearing what has already been said' {Foucault 1963: xvi).
For Foucault, there can be no adjudicating positivist external
'reality' by which to evaluate the 'truth', the validity of a discourse
about knowledge. However, this position doesn't make Foucault
a relativist in the sense that 'anything goes', that it is impossible
to know anything and so forth. On the contrary, Foucault's
archeology adopts 'truth-claims' in themselves as the factual
background on which he builds his detailed studies. The only
level of factual 'reality' that interests Foucault is statements about
a presumed objective reality. This makes Foucault a contextualist
of the statements of observers of 'objective reality', an observer of
'situated knowledge' {Haraway 1989), an observer of the 'manufacturing of knowledge' (Knorr-Cetina 1981, 1983).
Foucault's main focus during his archeological period was on
scientific discourses and how objects of legitimate scientific investigations emerge. His principle interest was the emergence of
discourses about human nature through the 'human sciences'. and
how humans become the objects of their own scientific enquiries.
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Marxists and humanists generally - but an expression of individuals' very own existence in the specificity of power relations. 19
For Foucault, there cannot be liberty in a space without power
relations. T otalliberation from 'oppression', from power relations,
is a delusion, because power is not exclusively repressive, and
because power is 'capillary', diffused and everywhere. Those who
still want to believe in a grand teleological narrative of liberation
see Foucault as being pessimistic because of the impossibility of
escaping power relations. However, Foucault's view is simultaneously more accurate in terms of the conceptualization of power
('repressive' and 'positive'; constitutive and enabling) and ultimately
more optimistic for several reasons. First of all, Foucault's concept of power is less deterministic than that of those who believe
that humans are limited by their inherent nature or by the economic structure or by the iron law of historical materialism.
Foucault's focus on the 'conditions of emergence' and 'resistance'
suggests that power relations in the 'field of power' are not deterministic, but, on the contrary, a form of what I would call an 'openended determinism'. The field of power imposes constraints about
the possible options open to individuals and groups, but it is those
individuals and groups which ultimately make choices to accept
these constraints or to challenge them. Foucault reminds us that
[i]f one or the other were completely at the disposition of the other
and became his thing, an object on which he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of
power. ... In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be
on both sides at least a certain form of liberty. (Foucault 1988b: 12)
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Eric Darier
'11"\I"H"lrlllt't...:
11\,j
it
no
Ll
There are at least two ways of responding to Baudrillard's critique. First, Foucault's preoccupation was not about power per se.
It is not by design that Foucault defined power by saying what
it is not. For Foucault, 'power is not an institution, and not a
structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with'
(Foucault quoted in ibid. 42). The systematic use by Foucault of
'negatives' to define - or rather to 'n/efine' - a concept is evidently
a tactical move to avoid having to redefine concepts that one might
not want to employ in the first place. Foucault lifts the concept of
power (its simulacrum?) from its context (by the use of the negative), and leaves it suspended in order to lose the conventional
meaning of 'power'. Baudrillard would probably answer that 'it is
a good thing that terms lose their meaning at the limits of the
text', but would still complain that Foucault doesn't 'do it enough'
(ibid. 38). Secondly, when Foucault doesn't use a negative to
describe 'power', he gives an open definition which might not be
too far from what Baudrillard might consider to be a definition of
the 'simulacrum of power itself': 'it is the name that one attributes
to a complex strategical situation in a particular society' (Foucault,
cited in ibid. 93 ). Although Baudrillard would argue against the
'strategical' aspect of Foucault's definition, might it be possible to
say that this 'complex strategical situation' is the mise-en-scene of
the 'simulacrum of power itself'? After all, isn't a mise-en-scene a
strategy even if it is without any strategist or strategical intentions?
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LJ
of human life, especially the conditions for human biological reproduction. Current environmental concerns could be seen as an
extension of 'biopolitics', broadened to all life-forms and called
'ecopolitics' (Rutherford 1993). On this scenario, the normalizing
strategy of ecopolitics is the most recent attempt to extend control
('management') to the entire planet (Sachs 1993). In this context,
the promotion of ecocentrism by deep ecology, for example, can
be seen as not only a critique of prevalent, increasing instrumental
control of the natural world, but as inserting itself very well into
the new normalizing strategy of an ecopolitics. My point here
should not be interpreted as a negative evaluation of deep ecology
per se. Instead, I want to illustrate the complexity of power relations and the constant dangers - but also opportunities - lurking
in the field of power. In this context, the adoption of a Manichaean
approach to environmental 'issues' by many environmental theorists fails to acknowledge that their tactic of environmental resistance is always what de Certeau calls 'maneuver "within the enemy's
field of vision",' and cannot be positioned as a referential 'externality' (de Certeau 1984: 37). This is why Foucault's genealogical
approach is so important for an environmental critique.
Foucault's approach to 'space' is the third concept which might
also be extremely relevant to an environmental critique. Foucault
explored the problematization of 'space' within a historical context
(Foucault 1984e; 1989d: 99-106). According to the framework of
governmentality, the 'security' of the state is guaranteed not so
much directly by the control of a territory (space), but rather
through the increasing control of the population living in that
territory. In fact, Foucault suggested that at the beginning of the
seventeenth century the government of France started to 'think of
its territory on the model of the city'. According to Foucault,
The city was no longer perceived as a place of privilege, as an
exception in a territory of fields, forests and roads .... Instead, the
cities, with the problems that they raised, and the particular forms
that they took, served as the models for the governmental rationality
that was to apply to the whole of the territory. A state will be well
organised when a system of policing as tight and efficient as that of
the cities extends over the entire territory. (Foucault 1984b: 241)
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Eric Darier
more 'natural' environment) is similar to the critique of social ecologists who might agree with Foucault that the domestication of
nature was part of a system of (urban) power relations among
humans which had for its objective the maintenance of the given
social order (Bookchin 1982). As the environmental 'crisis' was
one of the results of specific power relations - such as social
inequalities and political hierarchy- it would presumably have to
be addressed before - or at least at the same time as the environmental 'crisis'. Obviously, deep ecologists, like George Sessions,
would interpret this focus on human issues as the continuation of
anthropocentrism which created the environmental 'crisis' in the
first place (Sessions 1995b). Locating Foucault with social ecologists
against deep ecologists is not accurate either. Foucault's studies of
the emergence and rise of 'human sciences' in the context of
governmentality - as a specific 'reason of state' based on security
- could also be the basis for a critique of anthropocentrism. However, unlike deep ecologists, Foucault would not suggest replacing
anthropocentrism by ecocentricism, which also presents its own set
of traps. For example, Foucault would probably agree with Timothy
Luke's critique of ecocentrism (i.e. anti I non-anthropocentrism)
as being also, ultimately, a humanly constructed category which is
policed by all-too-human ecocentrists. Justifying human actions in
the name of 'nature' leaves the unresolved problem of whose
(human) voice can legitimately speak for 'nature' and the inherent
dangers of such an approach.
As Luke remarks admirably,
deep ecology could function as a new strategy of power for normalising new ecological subjects - human and non-human - in
disciplines of self-effacing moral consciousness. In endorsing selfexpression as the inherent value of all ecospheric entities, deep
ecology also could advance the modern logic of domination by
retraining humans to surveil and steer themselves as well as other
beings in accord with 'Nature's dictates'. As a new philosophy of
nature, then, deep ecology provides the essential discursive grid for
a few enthusiastic ecosophical mandarins to interpret nature and
impose its deep ecology dictates on the unwilling many. (Luke
1988: 85)
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in which they were won and are maintained today. On the one
hand, popular consciousness tenaciously insists that people are less
free when they have less to consume even though many consumers
recognise that higher levels of consumption involve them in socially
constraining networks of dependency and debt that are not always
visible or economically quantifiable. But it is rank First World arrogance to suggest that people in non-consumer societies are somehow more free in their less commodified ways, or more healthy in
their freedom from diseases associated with life in high-consumption
societies' (ibid. 267). For a study of the social construction of human
'needs', see Leiss 1976.
Baudrillard makes a direct link between 'consumption' and the
'desire for totality' which implies that, for example, the longing for
a coherent ecological totality in fact sustains 'consumption'. For
Baudrillard, '[t]he desire to "moderate" consumption or establish a
normalising network of needs is naive and absurd moralism. At the
heart of the project from which emerges the systematic and indefinite
process of consumption is a frustrated desire for totality' (Baudrillard
1982: 25). It is because we cannot achieve a totalizing objective
world-view that we are consuming the world.
The discourse of 'wilderness' by deep ecologists is indeed the 'litmus
test of whether someone has firmly adopted a non-anthropocentric
ecological ethic that transcends mere environmental pragmatism and
enlightened human self-interest' (Chase 1991: 18).
'The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may well have marked a
unique watershed for Western humanity. History seemed to be poised
at a juncture: society could still choose to follow a course that yielded
a modest satisfaction of needs based on complementarity and the
equality of unequals. Or it could catapult into capitalism with its
rules of equivalence and the inequality of equals, both reinforced
by commodity exchange and a canon of "unlimited needs" that
confront "scarce resources"' (Bookchin 1982: 214-15).
For a superb application of the conceptual framework of the normalization of 'conduct' to the seventeenth century, see (Tully 1993a).
See also Rose 1990.
For an example of this position, see Mathews 1991. For Mathews
the issue is to 'find a metaphysical and ethical expression for the
intuition of "oneness" and interconnectedness' (p. 3). Despite the
obviously fundamentalist character and non-Foucauldian approach
of Mathews's search for the 'ecological self', it is possible to read
Mathews as a strategic counter-example to current non-ecological
modern selves. However, it is quite clear that Mathews does literally
'believe' in her metaphysical ethics. Again, this illustrates the tension
that Foucault identified in the environmental movement between a
critique of existing truth-claims and a political practice justified by
similar truth-claims (Foucault 1':ISXh: 15).
Part I
Histories
Introduction
In the decade since Foucault's death there has been a proliferation
of academic literature applying what could broadly be described
as poststructuralist insights to the study of gender, social policy,
health policy and medicine, education, international politics, etc.
However, in the area of environmental issues, works adopting
this approach have been most notable for their rarity, despite
occasional exceptions. 1
Modern thinking about the natural environment is characterized by the belief that nature can be managed or governed through
the application of the scientific principles of ecology. This chapter
considers how governing the environment in this sense involves
more than the familiar political activities of the modern administrative state. Environmental governance in advanced liberal societies is far more dependent on the role played by scientific expertise
in defining and managing environmental problems than the more
traditional state-centric notions of politics and power would suggest. Scientific ecology has become a political resource that in
important respects constitutes the objects of government and, at
the same time, provides the intellectual machinery essential for
the practice of such government.
Foucault's ideas of biopolitics and governmentality can help
provide a critical perspective on contemporary environmental problems. In this chapter I attempt to demonstrate this by developing
three basic propositions: first, that the concern with ecological
problems and environmental crises can be seen as a development of
what hmcault called 'the regulatory biopolitics of the population';
Paul Ruthertord
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(Foucault 1976: 141). By this Foucault was not denying that the
age-old problems of the biological struggle for existence, as manifested in the threat of famine and epidemic, could exert a political
effect on history. Such influences were clearly not new. Rather,
he was arguing that with economic development and increased
productivity during the eighteenth century it became possible to
gain some control over the threat of death at this basic biologicaldemographic level. Foucault's comments on why this occurred are
generally in line with standard accounts of modernization. He
argued that increases in agricultural productivity and availability
of resources in eighteenth-century Europe encouraged rapid demographic growth, and accompanied greater security from starvation and disease. Essential to this was the development of new areas
of knowledge, particularly in biology, agriculture, and public health
(Foucault 1980e: 168-72; 1976: 142).1t is against the background
of these transformations that Foucault identified the emergence of
the discourses on population and security. He was able to claim
that 'life enters history' precisely because these new technical and
normative disciplines provided relative control over the actual
conditions of life. In doing so, they took upon themselves responsibility for the control and modification of 'the life processes'
(Foucault 1976: 142).
In the modern West, knowledge of the biological conditions of
life and their relationship to individual and collective welfare thus
came to be reflected upon as political concerns, and no longer as
'an inaccessible substrate' that emerged only periodically against
the randomness of fate and death (ibid.). Political power was
no longer primarily sovereign power exercised over legal subjects
(over whom the ultimate authority was death), but was concerned
with the management of living beings and their relations with all
the factors that shape security and welfare. The influence which
biopower exercised over living beings was necessarily 'applied at
the level of life itself'; and in so operating, biopower simultaneously gained influence over the individual both politically and as a
biological entity. The corporeal nature of the body of the subject
was brought directly into the explicit calculations of power, and
was thereby transformed into a subjected body. The body (individually and collectively) became both the raw material of power
and at the same time that which produces and transforms itself as
a living being (ibid. 142-3; Hewitt 1983: 69).
Foucault explicitly discounts the suggestion that biopower resulted in the total integration of all aspects of life into the techniques
4.j
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Paul Rutherford
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of populations simultaneously requires the constitution and management of the environment in which those populations exist and
upon which they depend. Such a conclusion is implicit in Foucault's
approach, although not developed, and as a consequence Foucault
does not adequately deal with the way in which the political and
economic problematization of populations also gave rise, in more
recent times, to a similar problematization of nature and the
environment. 7 However, it is clear from Foucault's discussions of
the biopolitical regulation of populations that this assumes not only
the disciplining of individuals and populations, but also, necessarily,
a concern with the administration of 'all the conditions of life' as
represented by the environment.
For Foucault biopolitics, the task of administering life at the
level of the 'species body', represents the multiple points of application to the body (both individually and collectively) of disciplines
such as public health, medicine, demography, education, social
welfare, etc. (Barret-Kriegal 1992: 194 ). Ecology and environmental
management can also be regarded as expressions of biopolitics,
as these originate in, and operate upon, the same basic concerns
for managing the 'continuous and multiple relations' between
the population, its resources and the environment. Contemporary
ecological discourse, in other words, is an articulation of what
Foucault calls the 'population-riches problem'. This suggests a
specifically ecological or environmental dimension to biopolitics,
which renders more complex the way in which we understand the
body as the target and site of power. Not only are we forced to
deal with the individual 'anatomical' body and the social body, and
the relations between these, but we must also take into account
an ecological dimension in which the focus is on the relationship
between the social body and the biological species body. 8 This is
not to suggest that there will not be new forms of discipline and
normality directed at the body at the individual level (indeed, these
would appear to be a necessary component in ecological governmentality9), but that, as with areas of social policy such as public
health, the ecological is primarily biopolitical in nature- that is, it
is manifested in specific regulatory controls aimed at the population, albeit from a somewhat different perspective.
Governmental Rationality
roucault's work on biopolitics, especially the first volume of The
History of Sexuality, represents a development that goes beyond
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'The Entry ot
lite
into History'
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(ibid. 248). However, this should not be seen as support for those,
such as Habermas (1985) and Honneth (1991), who see in this
evidence of Foucault's alleged view of modernity as a totally
administered society. What is missed by such an assertion is the
genealogical lineage pointed to by Foucault's analysis. Reason of
state and police science are elements that contribute to the modern
governmental rationality, but do not fully define it. In order to
more fully understand Foucault's account of how disciplinary
biopower and modern state rationality are brought into play, it is
necessary to take into account the influence of liberalism.
49
understood as an institution but, rather, as an activity which consists in directing human conduct within the setting and with the
instruments of state.... Phrased differently, this latter question asked
what makes it necessary for there to be a government and what
objectives ought it to pursue with regard to society in order to
justify its existence. (Ibid. 354-5)
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Paul Rutherford
This new configuration of knowledge and techniques of government Foucault called 'governmentality'. He described this as the
ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this
very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target
population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy and
its essential technical means apparatuses of security .... [T]his type
of power which may be termed government, (results) on the one
hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental
apparatuses, and on the other, in the development of a whole complex
of savoirs (knowledges). (Foucault 199la: 102-3, emphasis added)
.:>I
Ecological Governmentality
Foucault saw the emergence of biopolitics in the eighteenth century as directly linked to an expanding series of population discourses focusing on health, criminality, education, sexuality, etc.
At the same time we can also find, in the historical scholarship,
evidence of the beginnings of a new discourse that had as its
object the environment. David Worster has dated the first systematic documentation of concern about this new problem in 1864,
with the publication of George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature,
a work which sought to demonstrate the danger to humanity and
to nature posed by rapid change in the global environment (Worster
1987b: 91-2).U Clarence Glacken has also identified Marsh's work
as marking the arrival of a modern perspective on the relationship
of humans to nature. The nineteenth century thus saw, in Glacken's
words, the advent of 'an entirely different order, influenced by the
theory of evolution, specialisation in the attainment of knowledge,
(and) acceleration in the transformation of nature' (Glacken 1967:
704-5). Anna Bramwell, in her history of environmentalism, similarly pointed to modern ecological concepts as deriving from 'a
set of biological, physical science and geographical ideas that arose
separately around the mid-nineteenth century' (Bramwell 1989:
15). The ideas of Malthus and Darwin on population also contributed to themes discernible in the modern ecological analysis of
environmental problems (Pepper 1984: 91-100)_12
This problematization of the relationship between population
and the environment can, as previously noted, be linked to three
major social developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the emergence of modern biology as the science of life, the
rapid increase in the population of Europe leading to a series of
mass migrations to other continents (Foucault 1991a: 98; Worster
1987b: 92-5), and the development of an international capitalist
market (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 135; Rabinow 1984: 17-18;
Worster 1987b: 92-5). Environmental historians such as Worster
note the importance of the interaction between these three factors
in the period pointed to by Foucault's work on the emergence of
biopolitics. Foucault identified 'the deep historical link' between the
rise of modern biopolitics and the emergence of the populationresources problem. His focus was on the processes which isolated
'the economy as a specific sector of reality and political economy
as the science and technique of intervention of government in
that f-ield of reality' (Foucault 1991a: 102). Worster has linked the
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None the less, at the broader strategic level of political rationalities, EIA can be described as an attempt at institutionalizing
ecological rationality in governmental and social choice mechanisms
(Bartlett 1990: 88-9). EIA is of course a regulatory mechanism
in the legal-juridical sense, but it is more than this. It attempts to
enhance the effectiveness of government (in the Foucauldian sense)
in regulating the complex and multiple materiality of the species
body, both by institutionalizing a scientized form of administrative
apparatus and, more importantly perhaps, by opening up the species body (population) in a new way to that generalized 'modality
of intervention' characterized by Foucault as panopticism. Hence,
a fundamental feature of EIA is that it also functions as a normalizing strategy; that is, it does not mandate specific outcomes from
the centre, but sets up a framework for rationalizing behaviour in
particular ways. In other words, EIA brings into being new relations
of power through an interpenetrating cluster of positive norms of
internal self-control and external regulation that effect a policing
of specific practices of the population, both at a general institutional level and through what Foucault describes as a 'positive
intervention in the behaviour of individuals' (Foucault 1988c: 159).
Systems ecology and the highly mathematized natural sciences
(such as atmospheric chemistry and physics) involved in global
ecosystem modelling exert a powerful influence across a wide
range of environmental policy and social planning areas. The ecological sciences are fundamental to key aspects of contemporary
biopolitics: ecological discourse both problematizes numerous areas
of life and at the same time elaborates programmes of environmental intervention aimed at normalizing the social relation to
nature in particular, ecologically benign ways. The contemporary
notion of the environment is constituted as inherently problematic
by the development of specialized scientific (as well as legal and
moral) discourse on ecology. This specialized discourse provides
what Rose and Miller (1992) have described as 'the intellectual
machinery of government', whereby social relations with nature
are thematized and brought into the domain of 'conscious political calculation' through the formation of programmes of government. Such programmes
presuppose that the real is programmable, that it is a domain
subject to certain determinants, rules, norms and processes that
can be acted upon and improved by authorities. They make the
objects of government thinkable in such a way that their ills appear
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Notes
1 See e.g. Cheney 1989; Darier 1996a, 1996b; Luke 1988; Peace
1996; Quigley 1992; Rutherford 1993, 1994a, 1994b, 1996.
2 In this attempt to deal directly with the relationship between the
microphysics of power and the broader institutional power structures, we can see a parallel between Foucault's concerns and some
of the ecological concerns of contemporary (largely German) social
theory. For a discussion of this, see ch. 5 below.
3 Foucault is referring to the work of police theorists, particularly von
Justi, who appropriated to political-administrative thought the new
demographic knowledge. Here, as elsewhere, Foucault appears to
refer to the 'environment' as the totality of natural resources and
physical living conditions of human populations.
4 '[W]hat government has to do with is nor territory but rather a
complex composed of men and things. The things with which this
sense of government is concerned are in fact men, but men in their
relations, their links, their imbrications with those other things which
are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its
specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; men in their relations to that other kind of things, customs, habits, ways of acting
and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in their relations to that other kind of
things, accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death,
etc.' (Foucault 1991a: 93). See also Foucault 198la: 238; 1988c: 104.
5 This is an argument mounted by Habermas and Honneth. See
Habermas 1985; Honneth 1991.
6 Foucault's use of 'modernity' at other times (e.g. Foucault 1991b) is
different.
7 Notwithstanding my suggestion above that Foucault hints at a
continuity between biopower and ecological risk, I think there are
two reasons for his not developing this link. The first is that he is
principally concerned with the development of the social sciences
and their relation to the formation of modern power. But second,
it can also be argued that Foucault's attitude towards the natural
sciences was not developed in a manner fully consistent with his own
analysis of the relation between power and knowledge. For a critique of Foucault's approach to the natural sciences see Rouse 1993:
137-62; 1987: ch. 7; Rutherford 1994a).
H The term social body can be regarded as a metaphor for 'the collective embodiment of the targets of power, the body as species, whether
in the form of an entire population or a specific group of prisoners,
school children, the insane and so forth, who are subject to specific
types of administration and regulation' (Hewitt 1983: 71 ). Foucault,
however, says that the term is not simply a metaphor: it refers to a
llhllcri,llity. The police 'take charge of the physical element of the
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social body'; the object of the police is first and foremost the complete regulation or 'whole management' of the 'complex and multiple
materiality' of the social body, the species body. The police is both
an 'institutional grouping' - i.e. a specific set of social apparatuses
and administrative structures - and a 'modality of intervention'
[Foucault eta!., quoted in Barret-Kriegal1992: 194]- i.e. a generalized type of political technology, a 'diagram' or 'schema', 'panopticism'.
For a discussion of Foucault's 'ambiguous' use of these two aspects
of his notion of biopower, see Donnelly 1992: 199-203.
For a discussion of how environmental education and environmental
drills are combined, in the case of the Canadian Green Plan, to instil
new ecological disciplinary practices in the daily lives of individuals
see Darier 1996a and ch. 8 below.
For discussion of Foucault's analysis of liberalism see Burchell 1991;
Gordon 1991: 27.
It is also worth noting that 1865 saw the establishment of the first
national environmental group in Britain (the Commons, Open Spaces
and Footpaths Preservation Society). The US Sierra Club was formed
in 1892. See Pepper 1984: 14. It is also worth noting the proliferation
of colonial geographic and conservation societies during this period.
See Schneider 1990; Grove 1990.
See Worster 1987a; Pepper 1984: 100-3. Worster notes that the bioeconomic approach of post-World War II systems ecology displays
a diminished reliance on earlier Darwinian evolutionary influences
(Worster 1987a: 331). See also Grove 1992.
It is these sorts of developments and their effects that Beck focuses
on as a key distinguishing feature of the 'risk society'.
For further discussion of the significance of global ecosystem modelling for a biopolitics of the environment, see Rutherford 1996.
Commoner's laws: (1) everything is connected to everything else; (2)
everything must go somewhere; (3) nature knows best; and (4) there
is no such thing as a free lunch (Commoner 1971: 33-46).
These limits are presented as the interaction between 'world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource
depletion'. See Meadows et a!. 1972: 29.
This is particularly evident when one considers the importance
of complex mathematical modelling of the global environment
(popularized by The Limits to Growth, first published in 1968). The
current approach to global warming is a far more sophisticated,
and more politically influential, response involving more complex
computer modelling of global phenomena than that of Limits to
Growth two decades ago (Butte! and Taylor 1992: 218, 221-2). See
Rutherford 1996.
Foucault saw the practice of police science as a clear example of this
pastoral attitude. See Foucault 1981 c.
See also Rutherford 1994c.
The Construction of
Environmental 'Awareness'
Introduction
Not a day goes by without the media, governments or the business community referring to the environment. Whether the issue
is an ecological disaster, an environmental impact study requested
by a citizens' group for an industrial or scientific project, the recycling of household waste or public health, the environment has
become an important concern in our society. At the political level,
individuals are organizing into interest groups or political parties
to promote and defend the cause of the environment. In Europe,
the environmental movement is present on the public scene as a
political party. In the United States, although there is no environmental party as such at the federal level, the environmental movement is nevertheless very active through interest groups or political
organizing. In every case, people are fighting to win respect for the
environment, against economic development based on the exploitation of nature. Many other examples could be given to show that
there is today a true concern for the environment, at least for
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vision with reference to the interdependence of all physical, biological, social and cultural elements. He points out that all the
components of the social environment must be considered on an
equal footing, each having the same importance in relation to the
whole. Moreover, these components develop a relationship of
mutualism among themselves. 'None of the new social institutions
will be superior to or more important than any of the others, and
all of them will have to be aware of and communicate and cooperate with one another' (Capra 1982: 265). The concern of cosmology
for the particular is based on the idea that each element of the
cosmos, as well as the environment as a whole, exercises a reciprocal influence on every other element. In fact, this cosmology
addresses the interrelationships between the components themselves
and their relationships with the whole, resituating mankind in a
new relationship to nature that is, in a relationship of responsibility and accountability vis-a-vis the environment. In fact, Capra
adds that this holistic vision, characteristic of cosmology, becomes
more than a mere system of analysis of our relationship to the
world. Cosmology appears as a self-organizing, transcendental and
even spiritual system (ibid. 285), from which our way of thinking,
our conception of the world, our way of behaving, etc. develop.
When it serves as a guide, cosmology takes on a sacred aspect. It
replaces, in a way, the divine model. Henceforth, individuals must
organize their thinking according to a macrocosmic vision of the
world. They must become conscious of the effects of their actions
on the environment as a whole, which now extends to the entire
planet.
According to Berman, economy and quantification are examples
of globalizing methods that enable us to grasp the cosmos in its
entirety.
The same class that came to power through the new economy, that
glorified the effort of the individual, and that began to see in
financial calculation a way of comprehending the entire cosmos,
came to regard quantification as the key to personal success because
quantification alone was thought to enable mastery over nature by
a rational understanding of its laws. (Berman 1981: 55-6)
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century, due, among other things, to the eruption of different technologies. The race to discover the physics of splitting the atom,
as part of the effort to build the atomic bomb, is but one striking example of unbridled ambition to totally control matter. The
nuclear arms race, started by the United States and Germany,
reflects the image of the crazy, unconscious scientist, unconcerned
about the repercussions of his work. Albert Einstein was asked
about the possible practical application of the theory of relativity
which he had discovered. He replied that the baby was born, and
what would it become? A few years later, it became disturbingly
evident that this scientific revolution had given birth to the atomic
bomb. Following the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Oppenheimer, the main physicist involved in the American scientific research, was blamed by the scientific community for having
participated in such a deadly project. He was criticized for his
pretended neutrality, his lack of ethics or scruples with regard to
the atomic project. Oppenheimer gave the following reply: 'When
you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do
it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have
had your technical success' (Oppenheimer 1954: 81). It is precisely
this conception of a scientist obsessed by a single idea discovery
that is called into question by a part of the scientific community
itself and by different social groups.
The importance of the environmentalist discourse lies in the
idea that we have to protect, on the one hand, the sorcerer's
apprentice from himself and, on the other hand, the environment
from human exploits. This critique of Cartesianism is echoed in
the scientific community, the very community which sees the idea
of objectivity and neutrality as essential to its approach. It has
contributed considerably to scientists becoming aware of their
own responsibility. Oppenheimer and Einstein later became fierce
opponents of the military use of nuclear energy.
pacifists, counterIn the early sixties, other social groups
cultural groups, etc. - challenged the general anthropocentric conception of mankind as exploiter of nature. The environmentalist
discourse is based on the attempt to put nature back at the heart
of our concerns, and to restore an ethic of responsibility to the
frivolous magician. For humans are the architects of their habitat.
It is difficult to deny the fact that human beings have always
reorganized their living environments to suit their needs, even in
spaces as primitive as caves; but environmentalists believe that
this obliges human beings to act responsibly. In other words, the
O't
Environmentalism is part of a systemic framework. In fact, environmentalists' main criticism of all scientific research is precisely that
it does not take into account its global effects on the environment.
In other words, environmentalists criticize scientists for having a
microcosmic vision rather than a holistic one.
While systemists respect recognized scientific standards, they
adopt a holistic framework of analysis, viewing the whole as in a
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Environmentalism
We now see that the medical discourse entails a new life-style and
the adoption of new values (Rosnay 1979: 197-220). This leads
to the following two statements: (1) new values are actually emerging through the environmentalist discourse- the environment and
the harmony implied in 'life-style' that the medical discourse have
helped to make visible and impose in our societies. Several authors
speak of this new environmentalist ethic, designating thereby the
new emerging values aimed at modifying the behaviour and life
of humans (Killingsworth and Palmer 1992: 45-8); (2) these new
values define and determine the form of existence that is desired
and desirable. They impose a new identity based on environmental
awareness and new rules for individuals. An environmentalist is
characterized by a life-style that is in harmony with nature and
the environment in which he or she lives. But health is not the
only issue in the new ethics being introduced. We can speak of a
human way of being. Far from turning in on the individual, the
life-style being promoted here entails a different approach to living
together, based on harmony, co-operation and communication
between individuals. Exchange and consensus are substituted for
the traditional reference to authority. Environmentalism is not only
a struggle against a system of domination of nature: it involves a
true political project: a system of values whereby individuals govern
themselves and try to govern the universe. Today, the ethics of
responsibility, the care that must be given to the environment and
nature, dictate the rules by which individuals must abide, because,
environmentalists claim, our lives and the survival of our species
depend on this.
Conclusion
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intransigence, and aggressiveness gradually gives way to cooperation, enthusiasm and conviviality. In other words, a new set
of rules is developing and taking hold, which legitimates, in the
'new society', the way in which an individual can give meaning to
his or her existence, and which will become the norm for judging
conduct and the way of being in our societies. For a rule or a
norm does not seek to counter violence so much as to restrain or
legitimate its use. This is an age-old drama: the introduction of
'good' rules of conduct to which individuals must submit, the
redefinition of a single, unique way of being that is essential for
the happiness and well-being of individuals. In fact, this other,
environmentalist way of living, of transcendentalism, is simply
part of the endless quest to give a just meaning to life, to give
one's life a purpose. The environmentalist discourse is based on
hope as a palliative for an absurd, senseless human existence.
Notes
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Introduction: On Limits
As Andrew Ross so pithily put it in The Chicago Gangster Theory
of Life, 'unlike other social movements, ecology is commonly
perceived as the one that says no, the anti-pleasure voice that says
you're never gonna get it, so get used to doing without' (Ross
1994: 268). Think of the three R's: reduce, reuse, recycle. Think
of the austerity and earnestness of waste-talk, toxics-talk, ozonetalk. It is not only that abundant pleasure is virtually absent in
(most) ecological discourse, but that it is often understood as
downright opposed to ecological principles; frugality and simplicity appear to act as antithetical principles to enjoyment or generosity. The message seems quite clear: we (whoever 'we' might be)
have had too much, and that 'having' has depleted the natural
world (and, on some accounts, our ecological selves, too); we
must now limit our 'having', even our 'being', so that nature can
be restored.
Ah, limits: the backbone of environmental discourse. The ecological idea of limits is that they come from nature itself; it then
follows that nature, if we know how to assess its warning signs
(or listen to it, depending on your shade of green), is telling us
that we are (or are nearly) at the limits of growth, of affluence, of
consumption. Transgress, and face the consequences. Ross goes on:
In certain environmentalist circles, you do not have to look far
to see the principle of scarcity being regarded as a rudimentary
circumstance of nature. This applies as much to resource-minded
environmentalists {heirs of the conservatism of the Progressive era),
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whose apocalyptic prognoses about 'limits to growth' are pragmatically addressed to the managers of industry, as to biocentric
nature activists (heirs of preservationism), morally moved to conserve and redeem sacrosanct areas of wilderness from human
contamination.... [I]ndeed ... limitation is the cardinal principle
of ecological thought. (Ibid. 261, 264)
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Population-Talk 1: Biopower
As Foucault notes, the eighteenth century saw the rise of a mode
of government based on the perception of people as a population
'with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and
death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of
illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation' (1976: 25). While many
societies had long since been concerned with population as an
indicator of wealth and prosperity, as Foucault writes:
this was the first time that a society had affirmed, in a constant
way, that its future and its fortune were tied not only to the
number and the uprightness of its citizens, to their marriage rules
and family organizations, but to the manner in which each individual made use of his [sic J sex .... There emerged the analysis of
modes of sexual conduct, their determinations and their effects, at
the boundary line of the biological and the economic domains.
There also appeared those systematic campaigns which ... tried to
transform the sexual conduct of couples into a concerted economic
and political behaviour. (Ibid. 26)
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Population discourse was, and continues to be, a mode of regulation, a series of practices of science in which sex is managed,
organized, aggregated and graphically compared across nationstates.1 Of course, the new 'science' of population did not appear
simply as a statistical tool to predict and control the sexual behaviour of individual persons; it appeared as a series of truth-claims
about optimal health and well-being to which rational individuals
could be expected to orient themselves, and toward which the
developing institutions of social welfare (and social purity) were
oriented. 2 Population discourse was thus an archetypical expression
of modernity; the effective management of people, and especially
sex, signalled efficiency, progress, control over nature and enlightenment. It was also, according to Foucault, 'without question an
indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter
would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of
bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the
phenomenon of population to economic processes' (ibid. 140-1).
Think of 'family planning', think of the progressive intrusion of a
sort of sexual Taylorism into the previously (supposedly) chaotic
and irrational desires of individual prospective parents.
As early as 1798, with the publication of Malthus's Essay on
the Principles of Population, a crucial component of this discourse
has been the possibility that there are, will be, or could be too many
people than is good for us. Part of population management thus
consists in limitation, and the achievement of modernity seems
to rest upon this practice. Indeed, there is a strong relationship
between the modern emergence of discourses of population limitation and the centrality of an idea of scarcity to capitalism. As Linda
Singer writes, 'The notion of scarcity is crucial to capitalism both as its justification (there's not enough, especially now, of what
we need to survive; therefore, let's control it so that the maximum
number of people benefit from it ... and sometimes, at least, as
that for which capitalism is the remedy' (Singer 1993: 35). While
there are many facets to this relationship, what is important to note
here is that population, rationality and scarcity are inextricably
interwoven in the fabric of capitalism.
In this context, the very logic of population management is that
its goals cannot be reached merely through the external imposition of codes of appropriate behaviour. While optimal levels and
standards may be the terrain of expert negotiation and statistical
analysis, efficient management (of reproduction, of eroticism) is
really a question of normativity or, more precisely, the mobilization
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Especially with the 1968 publication of Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, so-called overpopulation became a question not just
of people but of the planet. Wrote Ehrlich: 'the causal chain of
[environmental] deterioration ... is easily followed to its source ...
too many people' (ibid.). The erotic and reproductive bodies of
individuals became inserted not only into the discursive terrain of
human welfare (as had been the case in the commonly posited relationship between population and poverty), but into environmentality. 'Too many people' became a problem for nature. Deforestation,
energy shortages, pollution and other problems were caused by
too many human, consuming bodies. 'Too many people' became
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humans and non-humans alike from normative constraints, selfquestioning and disruption may be more promising.
Notes
1
2
3
As Barbara Duden notes, the term population lost its specific reference to human beings in the early nineteenth century; it can refer as
much 'to mosquitoes as to humans', thus subordinating the lives of
individuals (both human and non-human) to statistics. See Sachs
1993: 148.
It should be pointed out that a conclusive relationship between population (in and of itself) and poverty or health has never been shown.
There is some conflict in ecological circles about whether there are
already too many human beings on the planet, as some wilderness
advocates might argue, or whether there will be fairly soon, as might
be the position of resource management types. Complex calculations
of 'carrying capacity' aside, this confusion reinforces the idea that
'How many is too many?' is part of a discursive contestation about
what nature is supposed to look like.
In a recent article on population, among other things, in The Globe
and Mail of Toronto (Saturday 20 July 1996, Dl) eco-crisis manager
Thomas Homer-Dixon made this stance quite dear, stating that democracy might need to be sacrificed to ecology.
As Foucault notes, it is the so-called aberration that comes to define
the norm. Thus, the ideal subject of population-environment discourse
is only possible with the institution of the subject who needs to be
controlled, the proverbial 'population pervert'.
Not all environmentalisms can be understood in this way. Some, such
as deep ecology, are (arguably) anti-modern. In general, I am speaking
about mainstream environmentalism, which some have chosen to call
'resource managerial ism'. What is interesting to note, however, is that
on the issue of population, even some deep ecologists seem content to
accept population management strategies that derive from precisely
the 'shallow' ecological discourses to which they otherwise object.
See e.g. the 'Women's Declaration on Population Policies in Preparation for the 1994 International Conference on Population and
Development' (Mazur 1994: 267-72).
Introduction
Foucault did not develop his work on biopolitics into a consideration of environmental problems, but rather focused on the role of
the social sciences in producing the human subject through the
discursive practices of medicine, psychiatry and so on. Nor did he
consider in detail the way in which the natural sciences have
contributed to the problematization of nature and the subsequent
extension of the techniques of modern biopower in shaping the
contemporary social relation to nature. In chapter 2 above I discussed how Foucault's work on biopolitics and governmentality
can be developed to understand what Eric Darier has described as
the 'historico-epistemological conditions of emergence' of the environment as an object of public policy, and the associated 'environmental mobilisation of the population' through those policies
(Darier 1996a). Elsewhere I have considered Foucault's reluctance
to extend his analysis of power relations to encompass the natural
sciences, and in particular the way in which ecological science
acts to discipline and control the 'action environment' (including
the alignment of the physical environment) of social agents
(Rutherford 1994a).
In this chapter I consider this Foucauldian perspective on ecological problems in light of a discussion of the recent work of
German social theorists (Habermas, Eder, Beck and Luhmann)
who have sought to understand the connection between ecological
problems and the broader processes of societal modernization and
the ways in which the social relations with nature are influenced
by the link between power and knowledge in modern society.
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and expanded demand for professional expertise in areas of environmental management, assessment and administration (Christoff
1996; Weale 1992).
These tensions lead to 'definitional struggles over the scale,
degree and urgency of risks' (Beck 1992b: 46). On one level,
hazards appear as the creation of an autonomous process resulting from a strictly instrumental use of technology in commodity production. However, hazards are defined and evaluated
not privately at the level of the firm, but through a matrix of
'quasi-governmental power positions' incorporating debate among
scientific experts, juridical interpretation in the courts, and comment in the mass media. The unintended consequences of putative
private economic activities are transformed into socially defined
risks through scientific contests fought out by 'intellectual strategies in intellectual milieux'. Thus the production and distribution
of knowledge is central to the functioning of late modern society
(Beck 1992a: 112-14).
Yet, while the definition of risks results from a series of more or
less deliberate decisions (and is therefore social in character), it is
not political in the sense of being defined by the decisions of formal
political institutions. The Western political system is premissed on
a differentiation of parliamentary politics from the 'non-politics'
of the techno-economic pursuit of interests through private investment decisions and scientific research agendas. But it is primarily
in these areas that the decisions which produce ecological risks
are made. It is in this sense that Beck speaks of social change as
the autonomized, latent side-effect of scientific and technological
decisions (Beck 1992b: 183-4). This is not a distortion of modernity, but rather the result of the success of rationalization and
progress, and occurs in part through the equation of social with
economic progress assumed by Western utilitarian culture. Risk
society is thus shaped by two contradictory processes - the
institutionalization of representative democracy and the legitimation of the supposed intrinsic value of progress in scientific and
technical knowledge - which lead to far-reaching social changes
under the guise of 'normalcy'. Scientific and economic development
in risk society thus take on the status of a sub-politics which,
while not subject to institutionalized political authorization and
legitimation, nevertheless constantly produces and shapes ecological risks as the object of public discourse, over which governments
are called to act (Beck 1992a: 114-15; 1992b: 186-7). This scientifically generated awareness of ecological and technological risks
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A second pivotal concept for Luhmann's theory is the substitution of 'communication' for 'action' as the most basic operation of functional systems, in which communication becomes
the medium through which self-referentiality is produced and
sustained. Communication is the process whereby social systems
constitute themselves by observing themselves. Hence, the environment for Luhmann is 'anything which social communication can
refer to' (Miller 1994: 104).
When Luhmann does specifically address problems of ecology,
his concern is to examine how modern societal subsystems react
to these types of problems and to explain why 'society' has difficulty in perceiving and managing them appropriately (Luhmann
1989: 33-5). His approach to these questions is shaped by the
view of modern society as an assemblage of highly differentiated
functional subsystems, in which the key problem is the lack of
any central mechanism to control these subsystems, other than
the unco-ordinated reactions or autopoetic adjustments ('resonance') of each to the interference of the others (Sciulli 1994: 47).
This is so because each of the subsystems is directed to performing a relatively limited social function: for example, the subsystem
of economy is narrowly concerned with prices and payments,
rather than with the broader environment. Luhmann argues that
subsystems operate with a set of binary codes which specify the
ways in which reality becomes the subject of communication.
Codes specify values and counter-values (in law legal/illegal, in
science true/false), and operate so as to exclude other possible
ways of ordering reality (Luhmann 1989: 44-5). Subsystems react
to their environments (which includes the other subsystems) only
in the terms set out by these binary codes. Furthermore, because it
is through such codes that systems self-referentially differentiate
themselves from their environment, and because functional subsystems can discern and respond to environmental disturbances
only in terms of their own internal codes and meanings, the possibility of resonance between different subsystems is severely limited. At a general societal level this means that resonance between
different subsystems is restricted to what can be communicated
across subsystems as meaningful; thus, 'each system has a different
access to itself than to its environment which it can only construct
internally' (Luhmann 1994: 14).
Several significant consequences flow from Luhmann's approach.
First, talk of exposure to ecological risks is possible only where
there is resonance, or reaction, by a social subsystem to events in
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Ecological Modernization
One potentially fruitful way of connecting the macro-sociological
perspectives developed by theorists such as Beck and Eder with
institutionalization of specific regulatory practices and policies is
through the notion of ecological modernization. This term arises
out of recent attempts to analyse the changes that occurred during
the 1980s in the formulation and implementation of environmental
policy in Western Europe - especially in Germany, The Netherlands, Austria and the Scandinavian states. Peter Christoff sees
these changes as a response to the 'perceived limits of state regulatory intervention' in achieving improvement in environmental
management, and involving a whole range of policy approaches
and instruments aimed at the 'integrated management of "clean"
production'. These 'institutional transformations' are seen as resulting in significant changes both in investment patterns and production techniques (particularly in manufacturing and energy
production) and in the relationship between the state, industrial
interests and environmental groups (Christoff 1996).
The catalyst for these changes can be found in what Christoff
describes as the 'increasingly sophisticated forms of community
understanding and political mobilisation around environmental
issues'. Albert Weale argues that these changes can be understood
as a response to the increasing fragility (and declining effectiveness), throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, of the earlier political and policy coalitions in which environmental movements and
interests were involved (sec Cramer et al. 1989). According to
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Notes
1
While Foucault clearly located his work within the same broad
problematic as Weber, he insisted that post-war French philosophical
thought 'knew absolutely nothing - or only vaguely, only very
indirectly - about the current of Weberian thought' (see Foucault
1983b: 200).
Colin Gordon, however, argues that 'Weber is as innocent as Foucault
of the so-called Weberianism that adopts a uniform, monolithic
conception of historical phenomena of rationalization' (see Gordon
1987: 293-4). Brian Turner suggests that while Smart's characterization of Weber is justified, it is important to note that Weber did
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Part II
Environmentalities
Environmentality as Green
Govern mentality
Timothy W. Luke
In the USA, playing off stereotypes of 'the environmentalist', ranging from the limousine liberal to the Sierra Club backpacker to
Earth First! monkey-wrenchers, 'wise use' anti-environmentalism
feeds on the self-evidence of mass media coverage on the environment. Because elitist do-gooders and wacko tree-sitters allegedly
agitate to trade off people's jobs against the survival of spotted
owls, snail darters, or desert tortoises, the Wise Use/Property Rights
movement in the USA pumps up these images from the six o'clock
news as its essential credo: environmental protection is costing
jobs and undermining the American economy. Therefore, it is
right to have moved, as one of its key organizers, Ron Arnold, puts
it, to declare a 'holy war against the new pagans who worship
trees and sacrifice people' (Helvarg 1994: 12). The self-evidence
of radical fringe environmentalists abridging fundamental property
rights to realize their foolish pagan fantasies of resource nonuse, as depicted in any network television send-up of such ecosubversives, gives ordinary Americans causus belli to retaliate in
the name of economic rationality and sound governance.
Following Michel Foucault, this study comes out against the selfevidence of the six o'clock news to breach the Wise Use/Property
Rights movement's invocation of such historical constants, obvious
prerogatives or basic rights as their justification for anti-environmentalism. Rather than seeing mainstream or radical environmentalism so self-evidently as a distemper of foolish resource non-use
when it comes to nature, this study provisionally suggests that most
environmentalist movements now operate as a basic manifestation
of governmentality. Indeed, this 'green governmentality', which the
Wise Usc/Property Rights movement occasionally decries, would
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seem to be the latest phase in a solid series of statist practices beginning in the eighteenth century. Thus, this analysis is 'a breach of
self-evidence', and particularly 'of those self-evidences on which our
knowledges, acquiescences, and practices rest' (Foucault, in Burchell
et al. 1991: 76), during a time in which the US Speaker of the
House and the entire 104th Congress act as if they are Ron Arnold's
closest allies in the holy war against environmental protection.
As it is discursively constructed by contemporary technoscience,
the art of government now finds 'the principles of its rationality'
and 'the specific reality of the state' (Foucault 1991a: 97), like the
policy programmes of sustainable development, balanced growth
or ecological harmony for its many constituent populations of
human and non-human beings, in the systemic requirements of
ecology. Government comes into its own when it has the welfare
of a population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of
its wealth, longevity, health and so on, as its object. And ecology
gives rational governments all of life's biodiversity to reformat as
'endangered populations', needing various state ministrations as
objects of managerial control ignorant of what is being done
to them as part and parcel of 'a range of absolute new tactics
and techniques'(ibid. 100). Ecology simply crystallizes the latest
phase of the 'three movements: government, population, political
economy, which constitute ... a solid series, one which even today
has assuredly not been dissolved' (ibid. 102) in the formations
of green governmentality.
This chapter, then, collects together fragments of rhetoric with
shards of practice to probe a few green twists in the logic of
governmentality. Over the past generation, the time-space compression of postmodern living has brought the bio-power of the
entire planet, not merely that of human beings, under the strategic
ambit of state power. The environment, particularly the goals of
its protection in terms of 'safety' or 'security', has become a key
theme of many political operations, economic interventions and
ideological campaigns to raise public standards of collective
morality, personal responsibility and collective vigour. Therefore,
this brief discussion follows Foucault by exploring how green
governmentality in the United States operates as 'a whole series of
different tactics that combined in varying proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of regulating populations'
(Foucault 1976: 146).
These interconnections become even more intriguing in the
aftermath of the Cold War. Having won the long twilight struggle
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GeoPower in GeoEconomics/Geopolitics
A political, economic and technical incitement to talk about ecology, environments, or nature first surfaced in the 1960s, but it has
become far more pronounced in the 1990s. Not much of this talk
takes the form of general theory, because its practices have instead
been steered toward analysis, stock-taking and classification in
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quantitative, causal and humanistic studies. The project of 'sustainability', whether one speaks of sustainable development, growth
or use in relation to Earth's ecologies, embodies this new responsibility for the life processes in the American state's rationalized
harmonization of political economy with global ecology as a
form of green geopolitics. Taking 'ecology' into account creates
discourses on 'the environment' that derive not only from morality, but from rationality as well. Indeed, as humanity faced 'the
limits of growth', and heard 'the population bomb' ticking away,
ecologies and environments became more than something to be
judged morally; they became things the state must administer.
Ecology, then, has evolved into 'a public potential; it called for
management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses', as it was recognized in its environmentalized
manifestations to be 'a police matter' - 'not the repression of
disorder, but an ordered maximization of collective and individual
forces' (Foucault 1976: 24-5). After 1992, this geopolitics has
assumed many intriguingly green forms.
Discourses of 'geo-economics', as they have been expounded by
Robert Reich (1991), Lester Thurow (1992), Edward Luttwak
(1993) and others (Kennedy 1993; McLaughlin 1993; Oates 1989),
as well as rearticulations of geopolitics in an ecological register,
as they have been developed by President Bill Clinton or VicePresident AI Gore (1992), both express new understandings of the
Earth's economic and political importance as a site for the orderly
maximization of many material resources. Geo-economics, for
example, transforms through military metaphors and strategic
analogies what hitherto were regarded as purely economic concerns
into national security issues of wise resource use and sovereign
property rights. Government manipulation of trade policy, state
support of major corporations, or public aid for retraining labour
all become vital instruments for 'the continuation of the ancient
rivalry of the nations by new industrial means' (Luttwak 1993:
34 ). 1 The relative success or failure of national economies in headto-head global competition is taken by geo-economics as the
definitive register of any one nation-state's waxing or waning
international power, as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality and economic prowess. In this
context, many believe that ecological considerations can be ignored,
or at best given only meaningless symbolic responses, in the quest
to mobilize as many of the Earth's material resources as possible. In
the ongoing struggle over economic competitiveness, environmental
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growth in one place, like a panicular nation-state, means not having it in other places - namely, rival foreign nations. It also assumes
that material scarcity is a continual constraint; hence, all resources,
everywhere and at any time, must be subject to exploitation.
Geo-economics accepts the prevailing form of mass market consumerism as it presently exists, defines its rationalizing managerial
benefits as the public ends that advanced economies ought to
seek, and then affirms the need for hard discipline in elaborate
programmes of productivism, only now couched within rhetorics
of highly politicized national competition, as the means for sustaining mass market consumer life-styles in nations like the United
States. Creating economic growth, and producing more of it than
other equally aggressive developed and developing countries, is
the sine qua non of 'national security' in the 1990s. As Richard
Darman, President Bush's chief of OMB declared after Earth Day
in 1990, 'Americans did not fight and win the wars of the twentieth
century to make the world safe for green vegetables' (Sale 1993:
77). However, not everyone sees environmentalism in this age
of geo-economics as tantamount to subversion of an entire way of
life tied to using increased levels of natural resources to accelerate
economic growth. These geo-economic readings have also sparked
new discourses of social responsibility into life, such as the green
geopolitics of the Clinton administration with its intriguing codes
of ecological reflexivity.
This presidential commitment to deploying American power as
an environmental protection agency has waxed and waned over
the past quarter-century, but in 1995 President Clinton made this
sort of green geopolitics an integral part of his global doctrine
of 'engagement'. Indeed, 'to reassert America's leadership in the
post-Cold War world', and in moving 'from the industrial to the
information age, from the Cold War world to the global village',
President Clinton asserted:
We know that abroad we have the responsibility to advance freedom and democracy - to advance prosperity and the preservation of our planet ... in a world where the dividing line between
domestic and foreign policy is increasingly blurred ... Our personal,
family, and national future is affected by our policies on the environment at home and abroad. The common good at home is simply
not separate from our efforts to advance the common good around
the world. They must be one and the same if we are to be truly
secure in the world of the 21st century. (Clinton 1995)
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that come together 'in the eye of the beholder as a single large,
vivid image', so too are 'the myriad slight strands from earth's web
of life - woven so distinctively into our essence - that make up
the "resistance pattern" that reflects the image of God, faintly. By
experiencing nature in its fullest our own and that of all creation
with our senses and with our spiritual imagination, we can
glimpse, bright shining as the sun, the infinite image of God' (ibid.).
Having gathered all creation into his mind's eye, Gore's spiritual imagination projects an environmental hologram whose bits
encode a well-known story in their multi-dimensional patterns.
This is a moral equivalent of war. Here, Gore's new story of
Earth stewardship takes an odd turn as he identifies the need for
a Global Marshall Plan to launch sustainable development as the
basis of his green geopolitics. In that historic programme, as Gore
notes, several nations joined together 'to reorganise an entire
region of the world and change its way of life' (ibid. 296). Like the
Marshall Plan, Gore's new Global Marshall Plan must (strangely
for a design dedicated to environmental spiritual renewal) 'focus
on strategic goals and emphasise actions and programs that are
likely to remove the bottlenecks presently inhibiting the healthy
functioning of the global economy ... to serve human needs and
promote sustained economic progress' (ibid. 297). Here, Gore's
new story of stewardship of the Earth gets to its punchline. The
green geopolitics of his Global Marshall Plan provides a global
agenda for advancing a Strategic Environmental Initiative. Adopting strategic environmentalizing initiatives as the central organizing principle 'means embarking on an all-out effort to use every
policy and program, every law and institution, every treary and
alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action
- to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the
environment and to preserve and nurture our ecological system'
(ibid. 274 ). Geo-economics is a predatory nationalistic attempt to
monopolize material wealth for only a few in a handful of nationstates. Like President Clinton's theory of 'engagement', a green
geopolitics would recognize that our 'ecological system' is the
global business environment, as well as the world's natural environment. Both will be destroyed if we allow unchecked growth,
mindless consumption, dysfunctional development and obsessive
accumulation to continue. Both can be saved, however, if we plan
on a global scale for environmentally appropriate growth, mindful
consumption, sustainable development and careful accumulation
guided by an ethic of environmental stewardship.
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Eco-Knowledge as Theory/Practice
Geo-power in green geopolitics counters the logic of geo-economic
industrialism by moving liberal welfare states on to an ecological
footing, redeputizing some of their administrative personnel as
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bureaucratic greens. Because most consumers are willing participants in a dysfunctional geo-economic civilization not yet subject to
full-blown green governance, they must be forced to be functional
in accord with the regulatory goals of geo-environmentalizing
bureaucracies. Entirely new identities built around new collective
ends, like survival or sustainability, can be elaborated by systems
of eco-knowledge.
Inasmuch as economic and governmental techniques are a central focus of political struggle today, the complex interactions of
populations with their surroundings in political economies and
ecologies are forcing states to develop eco-knowledge in order to
redefine what is within their competence. co-knowledge codes
indicate that, to survive now, it is not enough for states merely
to maintain legal jurisdiction over their allegedly sovereign territories. As new limits to growth constantly are being discovered,
states are forced to guarantee their populations' productivity in
every environmental setting encompassed by the global political
economy (e.g. Hardin 1993).
Governmental discourses must methodically mobilize particular
assumptions, codes and procedures to enforce specific understandings of the economy and society. Yet, as geo-powered ecological
ethics about Earth in the balance will show, eco-knowledges work
just fine at performing these same tasks. Indeed, they can generate
new administrative 'truths' or managerial 'knowledges' that will
denominate codes of power with significant reserves of popular
legitimacy. Inasmuch as they classify, organize and legitimate larger
understandings of ecological reality, such discourses can authorize
or invalidate the options for constructing particular institutions,
practices or concepts in society at large. They simultaneously frame
the emergence of new collective subjectivities - global ecologies
as dynamic bio-economic systems - and collections of subjects
individuals as bio-economic units in such global systems - to protect
the environment. Still, as the Wise Use/Property Rights movement
reveals, one must remember how extensively the meanings of ecological subjectivity are still being contested on the Left and the
Right. Ecological subjectivity can be expressed in small-scale experiments by autonomous human beings following their own local
political agendas in many bio-regional communities, or it may be
retooled in vast statist programmes for interacting within Global
Marshall Plans, depending upon which interpretations are empowered where (Foucault 1976: 143-4). Whether traditional
geo-economic or newer geopolitic discourses, articulated in the
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137
concept of sustainable development does imply limits - not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organisation on environmental resources and by the
ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities ...
technology and social organisation can be both managed and improved to make way for a new era of economic growth. (Brundtland
1987: 8)
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Enviro-Discipline at Work
The ideas advanced by various exponents of sustainable development discourse are intriguing. And, perhaps if they were
implemented in the spirit that their originators intended, the ecological situation of the Earth might improve. Yet, even after two
decades of heeding the theory and practice of such eco-knowledge,
sustainable development mostly has not happened, and it most
likely will not happen, even though its advocates continue to be
celebrated as visionaries. Encircled by grids of ecological alarm,
sustainability discourse tells us that today's allegedly unsustainable
environments need to be disassembled, recombined and subjected
to the disciplinary designs of expert management. Enveloped in such
enviro-disciplinary frames, any environment could be redirected
to fulfil the ends of other economic scripts, managerial directives
and administrative writs denominated in sustainability values.
Sustainability, then, engenders its own forms of 'environmentality',
which would embed alternative instrumental rationalities beyond
those of pure market calculation in the policing of ecological spaces.
Initially, one can argue that the modern regime of bio-power
formation described by Foucault was not especially attentive to
the role of nature in the equations of biopolitics (Foucault 1976:
138-42). The controlled tactic of inserting human bodies into the
machineries of industrial and agricultural production as part and
parcel of strategically adjusting the growth of human populations to the development of industrial capitalism, however, did
generate systems of bio-power. Under such regimes, power/knowledge systems bring 'life and its mechanisms into the realm of
explicit calculations', making the manifold disciplines of knowledge
and discourses of power into new sorts of productive agency as
part of the 'transformation of human life' (ibid. 145 ). Once this
threshold was crossed, social experts began to recognize how the
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of reality, such discourses can authorize or invalidate the possibilities for constructing particular institutions, practices or goods
in society at large. They simultaneously frame the emergence of
collective subjectivities - nations as dynamic populations - and
collections of subjects - individuals as units in such nations (Luke
1993a). The parameters of enviro-discipline, in turn, can be reevaluated as 'the element in which are articulated the effects of a
certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to
a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and
reinforces the effects of this power' (Foucault 1975: 29). In green
governmentality, the disciplinary articulations of sustainability and
development centre on establishing and enforcing 'the right disposition of things' between humans and their environment.
The application of enviro-discipline expresses the authority of
eco-knowledgeable, geo-powered forces to police the fitness of all
biological organisms and the health of their natural environments.
Master concepts, like 'survival' or 'sustainability' for species and
their habitats, empower these masterful conceptualizers to inscribe
the biological/cultural/economic order of the Earth's many territories as an elaborate array of environments, requiring continuous enviro-discipline to guarantee ecological fitness. The survival
agenda, as Oates argues, 'applies simultaneously to individuals,
populations, communities, and ecosystems; and it applies simultaneously to the present and the future' (Oates 1989: 148).
When approached through this mind-set, the planet Earth
becomes an immense engine, or the human race's 'ecological
life-support system', which has 'with only occasional localised
failures' provided 'services upon which human society depends
consistently and without charge' (Cairns 1995). As this environmentalized engine, the Earth then generates 'ecosystem services',
or those derivative products and functions of natural systems that
human societies perceive as valuable (Westmen 1978). This complex
is what must survive; human life will continue if such survivalpromoting services continue. They include the generation of soils,
the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solar energy, conversion of solar energy into biomass, accumulation/purification/
distribution of water, control of pests, provision of a genetic library,
maintenance of breathable air, control of micro- and macroclimates, pollination of plants, diversification of animal species,
development of buffering mechanisms in catastrophes and aesthetic enrichment (Cairns 1995). As an environmental engine, the
14/
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14Y
Conclusion
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1;:)1
Notes
1 James Fallows (1989) pursues a similar line of argument.
2 The statistical surveillance regime of states, as Foucault maintains,
emerges alongside monarchical absolutism during the late seventeenth
century. Intellectual disciplines, ranging from geography and cartography to statistics and civil engineering, are mobilized to inventory
and organize the wealth of populations in territories by the state. For
additional discussion, see Burchell et al. 1991: 1-48. A very useful
example of sustainability thinking conjoined with professional-technical environmentality can be found in Trzyna 1995.
3 For a typical expression of sustainability discourse as a legitimation
code, see Young 1990.
4 For more elaboration of why state power must guarantee environmental security, see Myers 1993.
Thomas Heyd
Introduction
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Heterotopias
Desanctification of space comes down to a reductive conceptualization of inherently significant places into sites merely 'defined by
relations of proximity between points or elements; formally we can
describe these relations as series, trees, or grids' (Foucault 1986:
23 ). Indeed, the notion of place is becoming largely lost in a society
that actively supports the proliferation of establishments such as
identical-looking fast food outlets, gas bars and malls, and that
(dis-?)orients itself to a large extent by images from anywhere,
which in turn are reproduced anywhere else, on ubiquitous television screens. Foucault supposes, however, that
perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices
have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we
regard as simple givens: for example between private space and
public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that
of work. (Ibid.)
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Boulder structures
Aboriginal medicine wheel boulder structures may be seen as
heterotopias - that is, as counter-sites - because, although they
are located in the 'productive' spaces of industrial agriculture of
the prairies, they 'suspect' and interrogate those spaces and the
concomitant, violently interventionist practices. These boulder
structures juxtapose incompatible sites by bringing together a
perspective on land of its original inhabitants and a perspective
on land of its present exploitation-oriented users. In so far as the
origin of these sites points to times receding indefinitely far into
the past, reflection on them constitutes a slice or break in the
ordinary perception of time. In so far as they remain recalcitrant
to interpretation, they make evident that 'opening' knowledge
may be required for their comprehension; in fact, their cryptic
nature makes them places 'outside of all places' (ibid. 24).
In their resistance to interpretation, these boulder structures
return our gaze to the prairies, turned into denatured, overgrazed
cattle pastures, and to the once verdant river valleys, turned into
flooded, mega-project water reservoirs. In so far as medicine wheels
are structures built not against the land, as are most of our contemporary users' interventions in the prairie landscape, but with
and into the land, they constitute 'a kind of effectively enacted
utopia'.
Notes
But see Nikiforuk 1992: 54, which quotes Michael Wilson as saying
that Brumley's definition 'leaves out a whole variety of closely related
stone spokes, circles and simple cairns'.
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It is to be noted that deconstructionist theory has thrown into question the very idea that the intentionality of the builders and users of
prehistoric sites is something stable that can be found or reconstructed: see e.g. Davis 1992. See also Wilson (1981: 336), who notes
that 'we cannot dig up ideas'. We may assume, however, that we are
on relatively safe ground as long as we seek only functions of items,
not intentions of individuals.
See also Bednarik (1991-2: 14), who argues that 'the older rock arts
were ... integrated into [newerl belief systems, [and] reinterpreted'.
But see e.g. Tilley (1991), who is willing to interpret them. Regarding
the willingness to speak of 'Ancient Amerindian Art', and to call
'artists' those who fashioned paintings, sculptures, etc. in the early
Americas, see e.g. Kubler 1991.
Recently the term 'heterotopia' has been popularized by Vattimo
(1992). He uses it in a different sense, however. Vattimo traces what
he sees as a transition from the idea of utopia to the idea of heterotopia
as the movement from monolithic to pluralistic conceptions of the
good life and the good society.
In caring for the earth and its creatures we must also learn to care
for ourselves, because taming nature with respect and love means
taming ourselves as well.
-Cronan (1993)
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least 2,000 years, though not necessarily in exactly the same way.
The history of the cultivation of the self, therefore, provides a
'general and very rich framework' for interpreting all autobiographical texts, all the 'so-called literature of the self' (1984d:
369). Taking this cue from Foucault, in this essay I analyse recent
nature writings in order to understand the practices used to define
and to change the self in light of ecological principles. Given the
subtle, often hidden linkages between self and social technologies,
a critique, based on the historical constitution of the subject,
needs to be brought to bear on new self-technologies advanced in
the name of ecological responsibility and well-being. Of particular
interest here is the nature journal, the notebook deployed to construct and to narrativize green subjectivity.
During the past decade, an increased proliferation of nature
writings has marked the emergence of an important cultural phenomenon, at least in North America. According to John A. Murray,
editor of New Nature's Voices, several thousand titles of nature
writings are listed in Books in Print, and even more are being
published (1992: xxiv). 1 At the same time, both the reading and
writing of nature are increasingly taught in the classroom as
ecological practices. 2 Mitchell Thomashow, like many other
educators, recommends keeping 'an ecological identity journal' as
a way of nourishing oneself as an active environmentalist (1995:
15). Countless people are keeping private nature journals, describing and puzzling out the meaning of their wild encounters with
desert and tundra, with wolverine and bear. 3 Certainly, it seems,
writing about such wilderness experiences is becoming almost as
meaningful as having them.
What, then, is to be understood by all this recent activity of
nature writing? Why do so many summer canoeists bear their
water-logged journals down Canada's French River? What kind
of subject production do these practices suggest? And, more
generally, how are personal nature writings linked to public
discourses of environmental knowledge and policy making? By
convention, according to Finch and Elder, nature writing as a
literary form is characterized by a 'filtering' of the experience of
nature 'through an individual sensibility' ( 1990: 26). It requires
that the writer not only reproduce direct knowledge of a specific
environment, but also exhibit a personal acquisition of natural
wisdom. As Barry Lopez writes in Arctic Dreams: 'The land urges
us to come around to an understanding of ourselves' ( 1986: 24 7).
As this essay argues, contemporary nature writing, at its most
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In Macy's description, the process of greening occurs as a somewhat mysterious, almost spontaneous development in which the
self-directed modern subject is being replaced by a receptive subject caught up in a moment of change: 'Oh, the sweetness of being
able to realise: I am my experience. I am this breathing. I am this
moment, and it is changing, continually arising in the fountain of
life' (ibid. 190). Macy's understanding of the greening of the self
is based on a sharp demarcation between a modern self (as a
construct, a metaphor and a falsehood) and a green self which is
unprohlematically a true and natural self. Macy is certainly not
alone in this way of thinking: As Max Oelschlaeger writes, 'The
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modern concept of the subject - Man-who-would-manage-theplanet' is often seen as a mere artifice, a veneer, a contingency, 'a
cultural accretion that overlays a wild nature, a first nature' (1994:
134). In the greening process, claims Joanna Macy, 'you become
more yourself' (1991: 189).
To consider the greening of the self in light of Foucault's body
of writings is to understand the process as a complex, deliberate
and perhaps ironic historical labour. In his essay 'Practising Criticism', Foucault argues that deep transformations must take place
in a 'free atmosphere' of critique. Thus, far from denying the
potential for liberating change, Foucault's method of making
'facile gestures difficult' makes real change possible (1988f: 155).
Joanna Macy's description of the greening of the self not only
assumes a rhapsodic recovery of a true self, but also obscures the
connections between the modern and the would-be green subject.
Yet, it is that very modern subject that invents and undertakes
appropriate self-technologies for the greening process. 'To be
modern', writes Foucault, 'is to take oneself as a complex and
difficult elaboration' (1984h: 41). It is Macy who chooses to adapt
Buddhist practice and systems theory to her own project of the
greening of the self. As Chaloupka and Cawley argue, the subject undertaking self-transformation in the name of nature is the
same self-improving, driven and resourceful modern subject we
know so well: 'Carrying our communicating, disciplined selves
out to a wilderness escape, we find functions and roles, even there.
We find assignments, too; we are there to relax, to recuperate, to
report back that nature still exists, that it still teaches lessons'
(Chaloupka and Cawley 1993: 15).
In Foucault's work, the subject is defined historically and is
disciplined by its own self-constituting practices. This way of constructing subjectivity reconceptualizes the production, in this case,
of a green subject into a historical development of appropriate
self-technologies. In 'An Aesthetics of Existence', Foucault makes
this telling comment: 'I believe ... that the subject is constituted
through practices of subjection, or in a more autonomous way,
through practices of liberation, of liberty, as in Antiquity on the
basis, of course, of a number of rules, styles, inventions to be
found in the cultural environment' (1988a: 51-2). Thus, by making
the constitution of the subject a matter of deploying appropriate
self-technologies, Foucault's writings open up the possibility of
what John Rajchman calls 'a practical freedom'. It is a freedom
'not of action, nor of intentions or desires, but of a choice of a
mode of being' 11992: 219).
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nature writers may write alone, for personal benefit, the habit of
good government over their affections is calculated to manifest
itself in the public performance of ecologically sound behaviour.
Thus, eco-pastoral writings are not just expressions of solitary or
free feelings; they struggle towards a collective change in values
and behaviour. In Foucault's terms, they constitute 'a true social
practice' (1984a: 51). Understood as a collective phenomenon,
eco-pastoral writings create a new cultural repertoire of appropriate emotions and habits, articulated in light of the ecological
knowledge that is only now being constructed at the material and
social levels. Good relations with nature are translated into a
myriad of appropriate feelings and activities, subtly connected to
the creation, maintenance and justification of the practitioner's
superior ecological consciousness and stewardship.
The most common practice of self-care narrated in nature writings is the account of a wilderness retreat. Considered the foremost 'practice of the wild', to use Gary Snyder's (1990) apt phrase,
wandering in the wilderness is a self-technology used to inculcate
in oneself elective connectivity to non-human nature. The retreat
from the world (into the desert, the forest or the country) is, of
course, a well-established self-technology in Western history and,
as such, it carries considerable cultural baggage, both good and
bad. How could it be otherwise? In general, the wilderness retreat
is a form of self-training undertaken, in various past cultures, to
liberate oneself from the luxuries and corruptions of society. In
The Care of Self, the third volume of The History of Sexuality,
Foucault analyses the retreat as one of the techniques of selfgovernance undertaken by certain cultivated men- such as Marcus
Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca - of the first two centuries of the
Roman Empire, a period which Foucault calls 'a kind of golden
age in the cultivation of the self' (1984a: 45). It was a time when
these few men - 'bearers of culture', as Foucault calls them converted their Stoical philosophical preoccupations into 'a whole
set of occupations', into the labour of the care of the self. The
retreat, in particular, was an austere practice whereby the practitioner submitted to a state of 'fancied poverty' (to use Seneca's
phrase); the practice included sleeping on straw, abstaining from
food and drink, or eating only poor quality of food, in order to
achieve superior detachment from the desires and vicissitudes of
the world (ibid. 60).
The wilderness retreat, in the late twentieth century, has certain resemblances to earlier modes of austere retreat, as well as
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11o
the local Eskimo language, as he says, he improvises an indigenous language, starting from scratch, by resorting to the elemental
gestures of breathing and bowing:
I took to bowing on these evening walks. I would bow slightly
with my hands in my pockets, towards the birds and the evidence
of life in their nests- because of their fecundity, unexpected in this
remote region, and because of the serene arctic light that came
down over the land like breath, like breathing.... I bowed. (Lopez
1986:
I bowed to what knows no deliberating legislature or parliament,
no religion, no competing theories of economics, and expression of
allegiance with the mystery of life. (Lopez ibid. 414; my emphasis)
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Nature Writing as
~eltlechnology
1//
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Sylvia Bowerbank
Notes
1
Part Ill
Resistances
Nature's Nation
You rapturously pose as deriving your law from nature, you want
something quite the reverse of that, you strange actors and selfdeceivers.
-Nietzsche
Custom is a second nature, which destroys the first one. But what
is nature? Why is custom not natural? I greatly fear that nature
may in itself be but a first custom, as custom is a second nature.
Pascal
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Peter Quigley
Nature as LJangerous
~pace
politics of environmentalism, if not also for the intellectual culture of the USA. I also plan to discuss the various ways in which
the eco-lit critical community is refusing to theorize from the
poststructural perspective, as well as how this same community is
labouring under a horribly distorted sense of what, for example, a
Foucauldian intervention into nature means.
Recent texts, articles and conferences have demonstrated that
there is, in much environmental discourse, a reactionary response
to poststructural thinking and a rearguard attempt to sweep away
its sceptical and progressive potential. At a recent conference,
'The Ends of Nature', at Kansas State, in addition to a few presentations that examined narratives of female bodies and foetuses,
an issue handled particularly well by Carol Stabile, there was a
general tendency to scoff at, deflect and generally seek consensus
regarding the mischievous nuisances created by that unknowing
urbanite, and European import, poststructuralism.
Bolstered by examples of eviscerated versions of poststructural
practice, 1 many participants seemed confident that such assaults
were exhausted, and exposed, and that those who indulged in
such approaches didn't get it, were harming the cause, and were
basically fouling the good work done by true nature lovers.
The keynote speaker, Carol Stabile, offers some energy for this
approach in her featured text, Feminism and the Technological Fix
(1994). There she castigates a monolithically characterized poststructuralism (we get no indication of variety) for its lack of politics, its
reduction of the social to language, and its capitulating ambiguity.
Challenging Marxism
It is interesting that, like romantic ecologists, some Marxists too
are 'fighting back', or resisting the position which claims that
there is no privileged position. Throughout her work is a resistance to the social being construed as the linguistic, to ignoring
the 'material circumstances surrounding ... production', the 'fragmentation of consciousness' (Stabile 1994: 148), 'political passivity'
(ibid. 151) and non-representation (ibid. 140). No mention is
made of critics like Michael Ryan (1982) or Mark Poster (1987)
who have examined the Marxist qualities inherent in deconstruction, or Linda Hutcheon (1989) who takes on this negative
definition of the postmodern: 'This misconception shows the danger
of defining the postmodern in terms of (French or American)
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185
Certainly, this is one of the oldest Marxist complaints about capitalism: the fact that it destroys some imagined sense of seamless,
homogenous social and psychological reality. He is concerned
with poststructuralism's concern with language instead of real
things presumably, because this fuels the consumption of images.
Once again one sees the Marxist concern with alienation, reification
and fetishization. The problem with this analysis, as with traditional Marxism, is the haunting sense of the positing of unmediated
realities. Gare does not pause to consider that poststructuralists
like Baudrillard do not applaud the world of images;2 they simply
suggest that it is where we are, and, further, that we are implicated, and there isn't a firm or disinterested position from which to
start. And, of course, Gare wants to do something. His impatience with the complications that poststructuralism has thrown
into the zealousness of the righteous opposition is everywhere
apparent. He calls for a 'realistic alternative' (ibid. 32). He laments
that '[o]riginal artists ... are no longer necessary, or even useful'
(ibid. 32). He decries the loss of 'grand narratives', 'genuine praxis'
and 'action' (ibid. 33 }. 'Once originality was regarded as important' (ibid. 29). 'Most improvements', the reader learns, 'have been
brought about by the pressure of direct action' (ibid. 78, my
emphasis). All these terms come from the confidence of the Enlightenment position. Later he calls for a return to thinking in totalities and nationalism, of all things. With the confidence of an
old historical materialism, Gare suggests that the current direction
of things - that is, the dominance of global capitalism - is
'irrational', and has 'the tendency to undermine the conditions of
its own existence' (ibid. 80). 3 Insinuating that the localized focus
of poststructural discourse is inadequate to the task, he feels it is
legitimate to assert the need for totalizing narratives. Gare seems
to have missed the discussion regarding how poststructural theory
is quite interested and capable of moving back and forth between
the local and the global. As Andrew Ross pointed out:
The comforts provided by the totalising, explanatory power of
Marxist categories are no longer enough to help us make sense of
the fragmented and various ways in which people live and negotiate the everyday life of consumer explanation or without significance. On the contrary, it is to say that such an explanation cannot
in itself account for the complex ideological processes through
which our various local insertions into the global economy are
represented and reproduced. (Ross 1988: xv)
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Peter Quigley
189
Challenging Mysticism
At the heart of the postmodernlpoststructural is a rejection of
unmediated foundations. In States of Grace: The Recovery of
Meaning in the Postmodern Age (1991), for example, Charlene
Spretnak both dismisses and appropriates the postmodern for her
own spiritually vague trajectory. By casting vague aspersions on
poststructural methodology, she moves quickly towards appropriating the term 'ecological postmodernism' for her own argument.
I agree with her claim that there is a reconstructive energy
residing within the initial deconstructive energy of poststructural
thinking. Spretnak's ecological postmodernism moves beyond, she
says, the 'nihilistic disintegration of all values' (Spretnak 1991:
19). However, her move is to fill out the terms of her spiritual
rhetoric of mystic interconnectedness by suggesting that her spiritual mysticism is a kind of postmodernism. In fact, the attack on
various theories by poststructuralism opens up the spiritual space
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Peter Quigley
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Evernden desperately tries to work his way out of the epistemological trap he sets for himself. He states that the choices are
either to make the self into nature - and then we are mechanical
and dwell in a realm without subjectivity -or to make nature into
the self 'and populate our landscape with the pets and puppets
that these pseudo humans inevitable become' (ibid. 108). Actually these positions present many more problems. Nevertheless,
Evernden inadvertently points to the solution I want to offer with
the help of Foucault.
Evernden knows that 'there is no "nature", and there never has
been' (ibid. 99). Yet, as he tries to work from this insight, from
the position that states that knowledge is a shaping force and not
a window, he clings to a sense of the real that continues to confuse his argument. He ends by countering common sense, another
word for ideology, or any other theorization of nature, with 'lived
experience' (ibid. 109, my emphasis). So we have inherited knowledge, which is common sense or ideology, and the distortions
of science. One wonders what it is that takes the place of these
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197
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Peter Quigley
such terms are deceptive, in that they try to seduce without argument. Foucault suggested the same thing when he said that power
is 'ensured not by rights, but by technique, not by the law, but
by normalisation, not by punishment, but by control' (1976: 89).
If one agrees that it is natural to be greedy, for example, then all
sorts of other behaviour, economic systems included, are much
easier to implement. And social policies involving helping people
are much more easily dismissed, or, as Foucault points out, those
that hold such beliefs are considered insane.
My suggestion was to abandon reference to absolutes, in that
they try to bring about change through the use of authority instead
of argument. References to the normal, the natural, the obvious,
are coercive, and abort fundamental issues regarding the structure
of our lives. My point in the article was to demonstrate how resistance theories are as guilty of this process as are dominant power
structures. Particularly illustrative of this problem is the classic
position of liberal humanist resistance laid out by Theodore Roszak.
In accounting for the shared point of resistance occupied by the
individual as well as the planet, Roszak defends it this way: 'this
right you feel so certain is yours, this right to have your uniqueness respected, perhaps even cultivated, is not an extension of
traditional values like civil liberty, equality, social democracy .... It
springs independently, from another, far more mysterious source'
(Roszak 1979: 7, my emphasis). In the same way that capitalism
establishes a free individual outside the vagaries of history and
the social to defend its brutal economic practices, so romantic
resistances like those promoted by Roszak play the same game.
Roszak feels he must establish his truth as more vital, real, sacred
than the one of the dominant structure. The problem is that he
uses the same machinery.
I tried to suggest towards the end of the article that there was a
form of nature that could still be used effectively while satisfying
the sceptical attacks on foundational arguments. If nature could be
seen as a force that disrupts, overwhelms, undermines, explodes
or otherwise 'makes strange' our ideological consensus, our anthropocentrism, then it is possible to see it as an agent of criticism and
deconstruction, as well as of reconstruction. The point was to
relieve 'nature' of the burden of carrying mysterious answers to
all of our questions, answers that spring from the most vague
sources of humanist foundational theory. Mostly, however, I have
used 'nature' as a force that can empty space, that can clear the
ground of ideological occupiers. Somewhat like Evernden's wild
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201
out, Foucault posits a possible point of opposition, but it is distinctly different from what we are used to in oppositional politics.
Like a bubble in molten rubber or rock or steel that is preserved
after hardening, these spaces seem to occur as a result of the
particular structuring of particular cultural moments: they are not
eternal. As Foucault states, 'There are also ... real places places
that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society
- which are something like counter-sites ... in which the real sites
that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted' (Foucault 1986: 22). It is also the
case, however, that Foucault stated that 'crisis heterotopias', which
are 'privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society ... in a state of crisis', are
disappearing (ibid. 24-5). Foucault's analysis of the internalization of discipline gives us a better sense of why deviance is less
observable. Some would say that Foucault's theories, which have
abandoned strong identification to clearly outlined resistance movements, are part of the reason for this. On the contrary, however,
one could argue that, because of a new understanding of power, it
is easier to see why resistance has been so ineffective. This understanding prepares one to support and comprehend any number
of protests emanating from various areas. And indeed, Foucault
was interested in supporting the 'new movements' emerging out
of the 1960s, such as feminism, gay rights and civil rights. Finally,
Foucault explores many unlikely spaces in the social structure
where tensions occur and discourses collide, and, therefore, where
change is possible. Chaloupka and Cawley point out, in a note,
Foucault's interest in Polynesian vacation villages, as '"a new
kind of temporal heterotopia"' (1993: 23, n. 34). The point here
is not to examine this site of nature and nudity, but to point out
that resistance and opposition will continue to be produced by the
social structure, and that these spaces will occur in places that are
different from traditional liberal humanist and Marxist theories.
Heterotopia characterizes the place of the language of resistance quite specifically. Like Bakhtin's object, it is a place full
of tension and criss-crossed with cultural dialogue. Wilderness
then becomes a cultural space, much to the dismay of critics like
Evernden. However, this is a space where, as Chaloupka and
Cawley say, 'wilderness may even begin to make sense' (ibid. 14).
This is an important point, since the mystical characterizations of
nature only serve to mystify and posit positions for new authority. Nature makes sense as a 'response' to culture. Nature may be
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Notes
1
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Neil Levy
many of the negative aspects of Western social and political structures are attributable to the dominance of a type of rationality often
described as 'instrumental', which looks upon the non-human world
as so many tools and resources to be manipulated for human
ends, and sees only those ends which can be measured in terms of
efficiency and economy as being valuable (Soper 1995: 5).
These superficial similarities notwithstanding, however, it would
be a mistake to see Foucault or his poststructuralist colleagues as
lending aid and comfort to the deep ecological project. French
anti-humanism is not ecological eco-centricism; nor does Foucault's
analysis of reason lead to a valorization of non-rational, or natural processes. If Foucault has a contribution to make to the environmental movement, it must be sought elsewhere, in less obvious
places. In what follows, I will first sketch the reasons for my
assertion that Foucault's work is not compatible with deep ecological thought. I will then proceed to show how certain aspects
of his work, especially of the first volume of The History of
Sexuality and associated texts, might be extended so as to yield a
relatively 'shallow', or anthropocentric, environmental ethics. This
conclusion may disappoint many deep ecologists, who might have
hoped to find philosophical resources in the work of the reputedly
radical French thinker. Nevertheless, this thought has the advantages of being eminently defensible and practical, as well as consonant with Foucault's work. If it can be shown that it is not deep
enough, I believe, then Foucault, along with much of the Western
rationalist tradition, must be abandoned in the search for an ethic
more appropriate to the dangers we face.
205
means the biosphere that will replace 'man' as the centre of thought.
Instead, what decentres the human is the system of codes which
interpret Being to a particular culture at a particular stage in its
history: 'The fundamental codes of a culture - those governing its
language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques,
its values, the hierarchy of its practices - establish for every man,
from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be
dealing and within which he will be at home' (ibid.).
It is these codes, which divide up and establish the mode of
being of reality at a pre-conscious level, which are the primary
focus of Foucault's archeological investigations. And while they
may not lie within reach of human control, they are thoroughly
cultural and historical. As the investigations of the epistemological foundations of natural history and biology in The Order of
Things make clear, these codes are not themselves natural, but
underlie our conception of the natural. 2 If Foucault rejects 'man'
as the meaning-bestowing centre of thought, it is not in order to
replace 'him' with a non-human substratum or system. Instead,
what replaces the individual is the equally human historical sedimentation of meaning and codes which go to make up a culture.
Furthermore, Foucault gives us other grounds for being suspicious of deep ecological positions, at least in so far as the concept of
nature remains central to such positions. From Foucault's perspective, any invocation of such a normative notion, which claims
to stand apart from the flow of history, is profoundly suspicious.
And the concept of nature does seem to be indispensable to the
deeper environmental ethics. 3 Why does this river have rights, and
not this bulldozer? I presume that the answer will have something
to do with the assertion that the river is a natural part of the
landscape, whereas the bulldozer is artificiaL
Foucault has no deconstructive critique of the concept of nature
to offer. Instead, he gives us a description of the way in which
the term has functioned in discourse. In the first volume of The
History of Sexuality, he traces the ways in which the claimed
naturalness of sex and sexuality have acted as a powerful mechanism to normalize individuals and populations: 'Situated at the point
of intersection of a technique of confession and a scientific discursivity ... sexuality was defined as being "by nature": a domain
susceptible to pathological processes, and hence one calling for
therapeutic or normalising interventions' (Foucault 1976: 68).
The naturalization of sexuality has a fourfold function. First, it
serves to tie individuals to an identity, an essence which can he
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Neil Levy
LUI
is important to preserve, and (b) that the entity so called is essentially outside history. If something is natural, it is eternal and
unchangeable, at least in its essential aspects. Foucault's objections
to nature, then, like Barthes's objection to myth, lie in nature's
transformation of the historical into the eternal. 4
For these reasons, the term 'nature' has a powerfully negative
value in Foucault's writings. But it will immediately be objected
that the nature which Foucault critiques and the nature to which
environmental ethics has recourse are not the same entity. At the
very least, they have a different site. As Jonathan Dollimore has
argued, if the evocation of the term 'nature' by the Green movement risks carrying along with it a whole set of reactionary political significations, 'there are obvious and fundamental distinctions
which can help prevent that - between human nature and the
nature that is destroyed by human culture; between the ecological
and the ideological conceptions of nature' (in Soper 1995: 119).
That is, Foucault wishes to deny, not that there is a world
outside ourselves, which exists independently of our history, but
that we have a nature, an essence, to which we have an obligation
to conform. In this sense, he continues the French line of antiessentialist thought which stretches back to the existentialists.
Explicitly, at least, Foucault has nothing to say about nature as
it might exist outside of us. 5 However, the distinctions which
Dollimore calls upon us to respect are not as easily established as
he would seem to believe. Foucault's insistence on the role of
cultural codes in constituting our perception of reality by dividing
it up and assigning it a mode of being before we can encounter it
forecloses the space in which a nature which is independent of us
could appear. If there is nature in Foucault's work, we can have
no knowledge of it.
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Neil Levy
LUY
Beyond Nature
Nevertheless, Foucault was never content to remain at this level
of the strategic reversal of the concepts employed by the dominant discourse. Such a reversal may constitute a necessary first step
toward a discourse of resistance, but it needs to be followed up by
the formulation of concepts which to some extent at least break
with the presuppositions of the deployment which it opposes.
The demand that nature be respected may have a number of positive effects. But it always remains open to recolonization by the very
discourse to which it is opposed. The situation is exactly analogous to Foucault's reading of the critique which Reich instituted
of the control of sexuality, in the very name of sexuality: 'The
importance of this critique and its impact on reality were substantial. But the very possibility of its success was tied to the fact that
it always unfolded within the deployment of sexuality, and not
outside or against it' (Foucault 1976: 131 ).
It is necessary, then, to go beyond this strictly reactive stage. In
Foucault's view, the inability to formulate a vocabulary which is
not simply the reverse of the deployment of sexuality constituted
the major failing of the '[h]omosexualliberation movements', which
remain 'caught at the level of demands for the right to their
sexuality' (Foucault 1980a: 220). Feminism, on the other hand,
has been more successful in working through this necessary stage
of strategic reversal:
the feminist movements have accepted the challenge. Are we sex by
nature? Well, then, let it be but in its singularity, in its irreducible
specificity. Let us draw the consequences from it and reinvent our
own type of political, cultural and economic existence .... Always
the same movement: take off from this sexuality in which movements can be colonised, go beyond them in order to reach other
affirmations. (Foucault 1989a: 144)
For Foucault, homosexuals could get beyond strategic reversal by
abandoning the question of the homosexual identity, and instead
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Neil Levy
BioPower
Let us return once more to the concept of nature. Besides the
deconstructive critique of its foundations, and the historical critique of its functioning, there is yet a third reason to doubt the
efficacy of an appeal to nature as an environmental tactic. Consider some definitions of nature advanced by environmentalist
philosophers. Nature is that which 'has not been modified by
human hand', that which 'is independent of us' (Elliot 1995: 79,
82), that which 'is human neither in itself nor in its origins'
(Passmore 1995: 129). Regardless of whether this nature can be
conceptually defined, whether an untainted origin or essence could
ever be postulated for it, there is good reason to believe that such
a nature does not exist today. Given the ubiquity of the human
presence on the earth today, as indicated by the effect human
activity has on patterns of weather, on the composition of the air,
on the amount of ultraviolet radiation, even in places where no
human has ever lived and no tree been felled, and given the potential we now have to destroy much of life at a stroke with nuclear
weapons, it is not clear that there is any place on the Earth which
exists independently of us, which has not been modified by use, or
could not be very dramatically further modified. 6 As Bill McKibben
has noted, nature in this sense has ended: 'By changing the weather,
we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have
deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature's independence is its meaning; without it there is
nothing but us' (McKibben 1989: 58). We are not in control of
the non-human world, because we are unable to predict with any
accuracy the effects of our actions upon it. Nevertheless, that
world can no longer be said to exist independently of us.
Ll I
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Neil Levy
Perhaps, then, now that the life of not one species but of all is the
stake of our politics, we have crossed a new threshold: the threshold, perhaps, of postmodernity.
The entry of life on to the stage of history changed the stakes
and the methods of political struggle. If the dominant powers
now operated through the optimization of the conditions for life,
then the counter-powers which opposed them utilized the same
vocabulary, and fought over the same stakes. Bio-power instituted
'a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a
sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that
was bent on controlling it' (ibid. 145).
Li,J
Foucault, of course, wished to resist certain features of biopower, to the extent to which sexuality was the primary means
by which power was given access to the smallest recesses of both
individuals and of populations, and the form this sexuality took
involved the coercive normalization of individuals, as well as an
undesirable degree of control over populations. He wished to
move beyond a struggle formulated in terms of the life of individuals and populations, their health and their sexualities, to a
less coercive way of imagining the autonomy of the subject. To
this end, he formulated the aesthetic analogy which he was to
develop in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, which enabled him to think of the individual as needing to
be created, rather than brought into harmony with its being. But
in the case of a discourse of bio-power which takes as its object of
analysis the non-human world, no such problem of essentializing
definition arises. Bio-power need not, therefore, have any coercive
or normalizing functions when it is turned away from the human
and toward the non-human.
The fact that Foucault himself attempted to go beyond biopower, therefore, need not present a Foucauldian environmental
discourse which remains within its framework with any obstacle;
for his critique of bio-power was predicated on its coercive effects
when applied at the level of individual identity. In fact, Foucault
himself, in what appears to be his only pronouncement upon
environmentalism, seems to have come to the same conclusion,
that it is necessary to remain with the confines of discourses prevalent today, in order to develop an environmental critique:
Things being what they are, nothing has, up to the present, proved
that we could define a strategy exterior to [the obligation of truth].
It is indeed in this field of obligation to truth that we sometimes
can avoid in one way or another the effects of a domination, linked
to structures of truth or to institutions charged with truth. To say
these things very schematically, we can find many examples: there
has been an ecology movement ... which has often been, in one
sense, in hostile relationship with science or at least with a technology guaranteed in terms of truth. Bur in fact, ecology also spoke
a language of truth. It was in the name of knowledge concerning
nature, the equilibrium of the processes of living things, and so
forth, that one could level the criticism. We escaped then a domination of truth, not by playing a game that was a complete stranger
to the game of truth, hut in playing it otherwise. (Foucault 1988h:
IS)
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Neil Levy
It may be, then, that it is by applying the very strategies of governmentality which Foucault analysed and critiqued for us that
a Foucauldian environmental discourse can find its most potent
resource.
Strategies of Governmentality
If our current situation can really be accurately characterized as
the extension of bio-power from the realm of population to that
of all life, does that entail that the strategies we should be adopting are those of management of the non-human world, as well as
that of the human? I believe that it does. But I do not believe that
this necessitates, or even makes possible, the genetically engineered,
artificial world which McKibben and many others who have
advocated non-anthropocentric ethics have feared, the replacement
of the natural world with 'a space station' (McKibben 1989: 170).
And not just for the reason that, after the end of nature, the
artificial/natural distinction is impossible to maintain. The world
McKibben fears, in which forests are replaced by trees designed
by us for maximum efficiency at absorbing carbon, and new strains
of genetically engineered corn flourish in the new conditions
brought about by global warming, seems to me unlikely in the
extreme. The systems with which we are dealing, the imbrication
of a huge variety of forms of life with chemical processes, with
meteorological and geographic processes, are so complex, and
occur on such scale, that I can see no way in which they could be
replaced by artificial systems which would fulfil the same functions. Every intervention we make in that direction has consequences which are so far-reaching, and involve so many variables
and as yet undetected connections between relatively independent systems, that they are practically unforeseeable. To replace
non-human systems with mechanisms of our own devising would
involve thousands of such interventions, each of which would
then require follow-up interventions in order to reverse or control
their unintended consequences. Even when, and if, our knowledge
of the environment were to reach a stage at which we were able
to predict the consequences of our interventions, it would be likely
to be far easier, and, in the long run, cheaper, simply to turn the
already functioning, 'natural' systems to our advantage. No method
of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is
likely to be more effective than preserving the Amazonian rain
Ll;)
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Neil levy
Notes
1 Thus Kate Soper: 'insofar as theory of sexuality and the body denies
a realist conception of nature, it is ... incompatible with ecological
thinking' (Soper 1995: 130-1 ).
2 It is true that some poststructuralists, more closely allied to Heidegger
than is Foucault, adopt an even less humanist vocabulary, referring
to that which underlies perception, knowledge and even culture, not
as a system of codes, but as Being. It remains the case that the
primary exemplar of this Being is usually language, which even for
Heidegger was 'the house of Being' (Heidegger 1977: 193).
3 There are, of course, alternative foundations for the possibility of
an environmental ethics. Unfortunately, none of those which I have
encountered survive poststructural critique any better than does
'nature'. For instance, environmentalists sometimes attempt to defend
ecosystems on the ground of their beauty (e.g. Sober 1995: 246);
enough work has by now been done on the history and ideological
functioning of aesthetic criteria (e.g. by Pierre Bourdieu) to make any
such appeal problematic in the extreme. Another such putative ground
refers to the origin of the natural world (e.g. Elliot 1995: 81; Callicott
1995: 50). Here too we are on shaky ground, given Derrida's critique
of the concept of the original and of the authentic. Furthermore,
these positions themselves rely upon a notion of nature at some level.
It is natural beauty that Sober wishes to ground his ethics, and it has
by no means been obvious to everyone that such beauty is greater
than that of machines (the Italian Futurists are here a case in point).
Sober, as much as any environmentalist who relies upon a notion
of nature unmediated by aesthetic argument, thus needs criteria to
distinguish between the natural world and the artefactual. Similarly,
those who would defend the natural on the grounds of its origin
stand in need of such criteria.
4 'Semiology has taught us that myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear
eternal' (Barthes 1978: 142).
5 On the other hand, it is clear that Foucault could not condone any of
the many environmental discourses which have recourse to our essential nature, such as Callicott's call for us to 'accept and affirm natural
biological laws, principles, and limitations in the human personal
and biological spheres' (Callicott 199 5: 54).
6 There are, of course, alternative definitions of nature which stress,
not its independence from us, but our belonging to it. The problem
with such definitions is that they do not contain any criteria which
would allow us to differentiate between what we may and may not
do to the non-human world. As Jan Narveson says, if we are part of
nature, this remains true, 'lnlo matter what we do to it' (1986: 120).
What do we need ethics for? 1 This question could probably summarize Foucault's own interrogation of 'ethics'. Maybe the word
ethics is so loaded with meaning that it would be better to abandon it altogether and, like Foucault, use other terms like 'aesthetics of existence' or 'practices of freedom'. In fact, Foucault's
position was more 'against ethics' (Caputo 1993 2 ) or located 'after
virtue' (Macintyre 1981) than the articulation of a yet another
'ethical' theory. If Foucault was critical - or at least suspicious of 'ethics' in general, he would probably be even more suspicious
of most contemporary 'environmental ethics', because of the tendency of advocates to use naturalistic and moralistic justifications.
This is what has been called the 'naturalistic fallacy'. The legitimation of most conventional environmental ethical theories seems to
rest - in the final instance - on a belief that the alleged 'natural
world' should be the source of norms or directions that humans
should obey. Like gods and 'objective scientific truth', 'nature'
becomes another normative yardstick to impose itself on human
behaviour and values. For example, it is in the name of the presumed 'proper' functioning of the 'ecosystem', in the name of
'sustainable development', that humans are now urged to adopt
new values and new sets of conduct. Furthermore, as the 'laws of
nature' are recognized as applying universally, the norms and
solutions which are derived from them also claim to be universal,
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Eric Darier
After denying adopting an ethical justification based on a 'naturalistic fallacy', Rolston tells us that as we prepare to enter the
next millennium, 'we must argue from the natural to the moral',
and that 'this biological world that is also ought to be' (ibid.).
Rolston becomes much bolder when he declares soon after that,
'If ]aced with revolution, ethical conservatives may shrink back
and refuse to think biologically, to naturalise ethics in the deep
sense' (ibid.). Although Rolston's targets here are anthropocentrists,
his argument falls into a naturalistic fallacy of his own ('from the
natural to the moral'). What seems to be missing from Rolston's
argument is an evaluation of the conditions for the emergence of
its own justifications and a heavy dose of much-needed scepticism. Failing to acknowledge that grand universalizing ethical theorizing is itself the product of a specific time and place, Rolston's
ethical position becomes just another totalizing theory. His naturalistic ultimate temptation is not, however, unique (Cheney
1989;4 Hargrove 19895 ). For example, even Max Oelschlaeger, who
is generally more sympathetic to postmodernism than Rolston, feels
that 'as opposed to "deconstructive or negative" post-modernism'
(Oelschlaeger 1995: 2), 'affirmative post-modernists naturalise the
category of "history", so that human beings are described as
members of the earth community' (ibid. 7). In this context, the
description/prescription by Rolston, Oelschlaeger and others of
what environmental ethics ought to be leads me to echo David
Halperin and ask: what do we need environmental ethics for?
:21'1
This is where Michel Foucault might help us in recontextualizing 'ethics' and in outlining the conditions for a possible green
'aesthetics of existence', while resisting the temptation to use a
naturalistic justification as a foundationalist anchor. 6
220
Eric Dorier
Foucauldian 'Ethics'
Knowing now what ethics is not for Foucault, is it possible to
examine what it could be, or rather, what the possibilities of nonfoundationalist ethics could offer? Just before his death in 1984,
Foucault published the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, in which he explored how 'one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees'
(Foucault 1984f: 8). As explained later in more detail, Foucault
didn't believe in the existence of a transhistorical, universal human
essence. He was strongly opposed to the humanist essentialist project on account of its potential totalizing consequences. This is
why Foucault's ethics can be described as being an attempt to outline a 'post-Auschwitz ethic' (Bernauer 1992), which is to say,
how it is possible to be 'ethical' after the systematic Nazi effort to
erase previously established 'ethics'.
If Foucault rejects the idea of human essence, he keeps the concept of identity. For him, individual identity- or rather, identities,
and certainly not essence - is the result of a historical construction emerging from within a specific cultural context. Identity
should be understood as what is located within the boundaries
221
222
Eric Darier
223
224
Eric Darier
225
- which would enable each individual 'to give one's self the rules
of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the
ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of
power to be played with a minimum of domination' (Foucault
1988b: 18).
226
Eric Darier
227
228
Eric Darier
LL'I
the multiplication of discourses about sexuality, ranging from medical explanations to Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis.
Far from being 'repressed', sexuality has been given new forms of
expression. Furthermore, it was the creation of the 'homosexual'
category by the medical profession which led to the emergence of
a new social group called 'homosexuals'. Individuals trapped in
the definition of 'homosexual' started to incorporate it as part of
their subjectivity. Therefore, it is not surprising that they started
to organize themselves politically as 'homosexuals'. However, it
was only in the 1970s that organized 'homosexuals' decided to
change their name to 'gays and lesbians', to create a tactical rupture between the narrowly defined medical term and the new
collective identity they wished to create. The very act of claiming
a 'gay or lesbian' identity was an act of resistance - a tactical
reversal- to the imposed 'homosexual' label. Yet, at the same time,
it was the existence of various discourses about 'homosexuality'
which created the conditions for the emergence of the contemporary 'gay and lesbian' movement. The form taken by 'gay and
lesbian' politics has been largely a discourse of 'liberation', from
oppression and from homophobia. Nevertheless, this 'liberatory'
discourse should be seen as a strategy of resistance, of posturing,
which is only part of a 'complex strategic situation in a particular
society', not some a priori grand project in favour of some universal, transhistoric, transparent and uncensored expression of
human sexuality.
This tactic of resistance, not liberation, became more obvious
in the political practices of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power), which have included spectacular actions that 'blocked
traffic on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, halted trading on
the New York Stock Exchange, and disrupted the broadcast of
the CBS Evening News' (Halperin 1995: 23). It is interesting to
note that these spectacular actions are a form of 'camp' politics
which is the overt, ironic exaggeration of a social role to increase
visibility and to undermine dominant, idealized role models. For
example, the 'drag queen' manages to attract attention to her/
himself (visibility), and to caricature to an extreme the heterosexual model of an ideal feminine body, thus undermining the
very possibility of such a heterosexual male fantasy. In the case of
ACT UP, the spectacular actions publicly present the 'victims' of
AIDS not in a patient role, but, on the contrary, as being very
'impatient'. One of the central objectives of ACT UP is to resist
the dispositif (apparatus) of normalization which emerges from
230
Eric Darier
231
and selfish, and only an authoritarian Leviathan could keep society from falling into chaos. There are many examples of how
abstract naturalistic categories can be used to justify specific sociopolitical systems. Indeed, it seems that 'nature will justify anything' (Winner 1986: 137). The rejection of foundationalism based
on the 'naturalistic fallacy' by some gay and lesbian activists is
an attempt to circumvent the pitfalls of such tactics. Whether
homosexuality is 'natural' is not an ontological and/or scientificorational question, but a choice within a specific context of relations
of power. For example, the late nineteenth-century German homosexual rights movement argued that homosexuality was a natural
condition, and should therefore be decriminalized. Sadly, the
Nazi regime also used a naturalistic argument (homosexuals are
indeed members of a natural category - a degenerate 'species') to
justify exterminating about 60,000 homosexuals in concentration
camps. Other homophobic discourses use the opposing argument
that homosexuality is not 'natural', because it doesn't result in
human reproduction. Therefore the choice of a foundationalist/
naturalist category always presents dangers. Halperin suggests that
it is a no-win tactical choice for gays and lesbians. There cannot
be any external 'rational' adjudicator in the debate about the
validity of foundationalist/naturalist categories. In fact, Halperin
goes further, and argues that the apparent incoherence of homophobic discourses, through a 'series of double binds', is in fact a
subtle dispositif to ensure their effective deployment with dire
political consequences (Halperin 1995: 33-8; Sedgwick 1990). '[l]f
homosexuality is an immutable characteristic, we lose our civil
rights, and if homosexuality is not an immutable characteristic,
we lose our civil rights. Anyone for rational argument on these
terms?' (Halperin 1995: 34).
Another act of resistance adopted by some gay and lesbian
activists consists in a reversal of discourse by questioning the
unproblematized norms which enable the identification, definition,
medicalization and control of 'abnormalities' such as 'homosexuality'. For example, 'lesbian and gay sexualities may be understood
and imagined as forms of resistance to cultural homogenisation,
counteracting dominant discourses with other constructions of
the subject in culture' (de Lauretis 1991: iii). In this context, the
issue is no longer the search for the causes of 'homosexuality',
but, on the contrary, the process which makes a norm unproblematized. [n practical terms, one of the central questions becomes:
how docs an individual become 'heterosexual'? This strategy of
232
Eric Darier
233
234
Eric Darier
specific context of power relations, it is possible to know if, tactically and at a given time, a Green act of resistance merely legitimizes
the existing system of power relations or if it undermines it.
Because of the extreme fluidity and adaptivity of the relations of
power, a genuine act of Green resistance yesterday could rapidly
become one of the legitimating elements for environmental practices contrary to the intentions of the initial acts of resistance. For
example, the quest for scientific knowledge about the functioning
of the natural environment can be seen as an instrument for
instigating changes in human practices which might otherwise have
arguably dire ecological and human consequences. However, the
same knowledge can also be used to justify the introduction of
changes in social practices vis-a-vis the 'environment' which, in
the longer term, could have even worse ecological and/or human
consequences. This is the case with 'conservationism', which wanted
to prevent deforestation, but led to increased exploitation of forests
for commercial and state interests, through greater scientific - and
presumably 'rational' - forest management (Darier 1991 ). Fire
prevention can be seen as a measure to protect forests (as well as
commercial, fiscal and tourism revenues), but can also lead to
long-term ecological decline if forests are prevented from regenerating themselves through fire. Therefore, the degree of 'greenness'
of resistance can be measured only in context, not in the abstract.
In summary, Green ethics based on resistance must be understood as an aesthetic of human existence rooted in a permanent,
radical questioning and re-questioning of the broader conditions
which result in humans seeing the world as they see it, so as to
think differently from the way they now think. It is through this
process of constant hyper-criticism and 'tactical hyper-activism'
(Gandal 1986: 122) that one can question the conditions which
account for one's subjectivity, and start to imagine and build new
kinds of subjectivities. For example, it is through practical opposition to a new landfill site or an incinerator that individuals and
communities may start questioning the conditions which have led
to a 'garbage crisis'. Household recycling can be one technical
alternative which transforms individual subjectivity from 'wasteful' consumer to recycling or Green consumer. However, it could
also lead one to re-question the entire process of consumerism,
and why and how individuals are seduced by it. In this case,
opposing a landfill site or incinerator might be a necessary condition for a radical shift from a consumer self to a post-consumer
self, which might be a green self (Conley 1993; Darier 1996b).
235
236
Eric Dorier
Nevertheless, the participation of environmental groups in environmental public hearings can also become a site of resistance
(Wynne 1982). For example, Richardson, Sherman and Gismondi
have documented the detailed struggle of environmental groups
and citizens in the context of a public environmental enquiry
concerning a $1.3 billion Cdn proposal to build a paper plant
in northern Alberta, Canada (Richardson et al. 1993 ). One argument used by the promoter, Alberta Pacific Forest Industries,
to justify the production of bleached paper was demand from
the market- more precisely, the demand from 'housewives'. The
promoter was trying to argue that the 'market' was imposed
on them, and external to their own corporate strategy. It was an
obvious attempt at shifting responsibility for environmental damage from the corporation to the consumer. It was also an obvious
attempt to 'naturalize' the market, by considering its functions as
an imposed imperative - like a law of nature that one ought to
submit to. In response, a local housewife shouted, 'Not this housewife!', to undermine the attempt. Most of the time, the instruments of environmental resistance, like public hearings, are imposed
by the overall relations of power. However - and even in generally unfavourable contexts hearings can be
moments ... when less powerful groups undermined the discourses
empowered by the dominant groups and in the process constructed
counter-discourses of their own .... The acts by subordinate groups,
of questioning convention, subverting dominant discourses and
asserting counter-discourses are highly political. (Richardson et a!.
1993)
237
238
Eric Darier
UU~UUII
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L.IIVIIUIIIIIt:::IIIUI
L-1111~;)
L-.)7
Notes
1
4
5
240
Eric Darier
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264
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265
266
Bibliography
Index
askesis 240n
Austria: ecological modernization in
109
author: death of 6
autopoiesis 106
Bachelard, Gaston 10, 96
Bakhtin, Mikhail 199-200
Barnet, Richard J. 125
Barthes, Roland 182, 192, 200, 207
Bartlett, R. 57-8
Baudrillard, Jean 20-1, 33n, 185,
202n
Beck, Ulrich 95, 101, 108, 111-12,
113, 115; ecological fields of
conflict 43-4; on environmentalism
4; risk society 62n, 103-6
Bell, Daniel 187
Bennett, Tony 199
Bentham, Jeremy: panopticon 158
Berman, Morris 66
Bernauer, James W. 220
Berry, Thomas 77
Berry, Wendell 174
big science 56, 113, 129
Bighorn Wheel 153, 154
biocentrism 148
bio-economics 53-4, 102
biology 11-12, 17, 22, 40-1, 51, 205
biophilia 148
268
Index
Index
deep ecology: anti-anthropocentrism
30, 236-7; challenged 196-200;
ecocentrism 23, 24; and
instrumental rationality 203-4; and
limits 80; and population control
94n; and technological modernity
101; wilderness discourse 33n
demography 149; see also population
deplacements 6, 10, 14, 16
Derrida, Jacques 30n, 182, 216n
Descartes, Rene 67
dialectic of environment 117
Diamond, Irene 87-8
Dillard, Annie 194, 196
discipline: and biopolitics 38-43, 45;
and the body 38-9, 46, 97, 122;
enviro-discipline 29, 142-8, 150; of
homosexuality 18; and population
81, 82; and power 17-18, 38;
of self 221-2; and societal
rationalization 96-7; and subject
167; see also ceo-confessional
Discipline and Punish 38, 39
Dobson, Andrew 13
Dollimore, Jonathan 207
Donzelot, Jacques 50
Drengson, Alan 171, 176
Dreyfus, Herbert 96
Duden, Barbara 94n
Dumm, Thomas 19, 31n
e-factor 131, 133, 140
Eagleton, Terry 181, 182, 200
Earth: carrying capacity 52, 139; as
environmental engine 146-7
Earth Days 131, 135
Earth Summit (1992) 53
earthworks 156-7
eco (as prefix) 171
ecocentrism 23, 24; see also deep
ecology
ecocide 71-2
ceo-confessional 167-71
ceo-knowledge 29, 133-42, 144, 150
ecological critique 111
ecological ethic of stability 147-8
ecological governmentality 28, 37,
51-60, 116-17, 121-51
ecological hazards see ecological risk
ecological identity work 167-71
ecological modernization 109-11,
115-lfi
269
270
Index
1naex
L/1
272
Index
tnclnx
I.IJ
Jil'l
274
Index
psychoanalysis 10
public environmental hearings 235-6
queer identity 18, 227-8, 230-3
queer politics 30, 93
queer theory 5, 227
Quigley, Peter 25, 30, 188, 197, 232,
233
Rabinow, Paul 96
racism 87, 90-1, 240n; anti-racist
movement 5
raison d'etat (reason of state) 28, 29,
46-7, 48
Rajchman, John 165, 166
rationality: ecological 112, 116-17;
instrumental 97-8, 128, 129,
203-4; societal rationalization
96-8
Ravetz, Jerome 2
Rawlings, D. L. 173-4
reason of state (raison d'etat) 28, 29,
46-7, 48
reflexive modernity 106, 115
Reich, Robert 124, 125, 209
religious experience 19 5
re-locations see deplacements
Renaissance squares as heterotopias
161
representationalism 11
Research Institute of Innovative
Technology for the Earth (Japan)
131
research programmes 54-5
resistance S, 18, 27, 30, 92, 196-200,
222-3; gay 227-33; Green 233-4
resource exploitation 52
retreats 172; wilderness 171, 172-3,
174-7
Richardson, Mary 236
Rifkin, Jeremy 69
rights 43, 72, 205; homosexual 231;
right of sovereignty 17-18
risk see ecological risk; environmental
risk
risk society 103-6
rock art 155-8
Rolston, Holmes, Ill 218
Roman Empire: retreats in 172
Rose, Nikolas 59-60, 115-17
Ro>s, AnJrew 2, 16, 79-80, 185-6,
197
Index
Roszak, Theodore 198, 233
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 230
Ruffie, Jacques 221
Rutherford, Paul 28, 29
Ryan, Michael 183
Sadik, Nafis 89, 90
Said, Edward W. 240n
Sandilands, Catriona 28-9
Sartre, Jean-Paul 10
Sarup, Madan 30
Scandinavia: ecological modernization
in 109
scarcity 13, 79-80, 82, 85; see ,dso
capitalism; limits
science 54, 101; big science 56, 113,
129; and environmentalism 68-70;
regulatory science 55-60; scientific
discourse 8, 10-12, 40-1; scientific
ecology 53-4, 102, 113, 116;
scientific knowledge 2, 101, 111-12;
scientization of risk 104-6, I 08;
US hegemony in 113-14; see also
biology; medicine; natural sciences;
technology
security: and environmental risk
103-6; and liberalism 48-50;
see also biopolitics; biopower;
governmentality
self 226-7, 237; discipline of 221-2;
Nietzsche and 240n; selfconstruction 25-7; self-limitation
240n; technologies of 8, 29,
163-78
Sessions, George 24, 30, 197
sexuality: control of 209; gay
resistance 227-33; and limits 28-9,
81-94; naturalization of 205-6;
normalization of 18, 90, 91,
205-6, 208, 213, 228-9; strategic
reversal of 231-2; see also History
of Sexuality, The; homosexuality;
population control
Sherman, Joan 236
Shiva, Vandana 87
Sierra Club (US) 62n
Singer, Linda 82, 83
Slovic, Scott 173
Smithson, Robert 156
Snyder, Gary 172
Sober, Elliott 21611
socia I body 61-211
social ecology 24
social practices: Foulault's apprn.H h
to 8, 14-25
social sciences 3, .I'J
social theory 2'1, 'J.'i-IIH
social welfare 50
societa I rat ion a liz:ll ion 'lh H
society: hctl'rotopias 111 IhO; .111d
knowll'dg<' 105, Ill 12, Ill; mk
society I 0.1-h
Soper, Kate .I, !.I h11
Sourni:l, .It-an ( :Lludt' 1.1.1
sovereign pown 17 I H, 4 I, !.I I
space !.I, !.I- 'i, !.'!, I '14; ht'tnotopi .._
15!.-h!.
276
Index